[4][5] During her childhood, she showed great fondness for books, and as a school-girl, the weekly or fortnightly "composition" was to her a pleasant past-time, a respite from the duller, more prosaic studies of mathematics and the rules of grammar.

It was her delight to be allowed, when out of school, to put her fancies into form in writing, or to sit surrounded by her young sisters and baby brother and tell them stories as she thought of them.

Fascinated for several years after her marriage with the idea of becoming a model housekeeper, and conscientious to a painful degree in the discharge of her duties as a mother, she wrote nothing for publication, and but little, even at the solicitations of friends, for special occasions.

It embodies a legend connected with the lake of that name in northern Indiana, in the vicinity of which Bates lived for several years before her marriage.

Other books included, The price of the Ring (1892), Shylock's Daughter (1894), Jasper Fairfax (1897), In the First Degree (1907), Hildegarde and Other Lyrics (1911), and Browning Critiques (1927).

[3] After three days of illness, Margret Holmes Bates died of heart disease at her home in New York City on January 21, 1927, aged 82.