[jEdit-Syntax-users] led from a neig

[Hackerott <fla...@en...>]

 more than the receptivity and quickness natural to a bright and
somewhat unusually clear intellect. Through all these anecdotes there
runs a vein denoting what is less common in childhood than a certain
precocity,--a keen sense of justice. She appears to have reasoned of
many things, usually taken by childhood for granted, and assented to
their results only if they seemed to her childishness just. If after
life showed her that the affairs of this life can be but seldom
regulated according to the ideas of finite justice, she never seems to
have lost a certain fairness of judgment and opinion, which is rare in
one of her sex and circumstances. When five years old, her mother,
wishing her to give up a pet doll to a little crippled friend, told her
that sympathy should suggest her doing it; that it was a privilege to
make another happy; that it was selfishness to prefer her own pleasure
of possession to that of another. But Mary listened unmoved to these
arguments. Nevertheless the struggle was not a long one. With a good
grace, after a few moments of silence, she carried the doll to her
unfortunate friend. "Mamma," she said soberly, "she shall have it, for
it is right that she should. I feel it. I shall have many things that
she can never have." For the logic of five years it was no small thing
to have settled this question in this way. It would take too much time
and too much space to dwell on the anecdotes of her childhood. Indeed,
the biographer does not linger on them long himself. "It is meet," he
says, "to speak of these early Years, not from a desire to show that
there was aught in the Childhood of Mary Twining remarkable or
unnatural, that should be the Cause of Wonder or Admiration. But the
rather that there may be evinced the Presence, even in the Germ, of
certain Qualities of Soundness of Judgment and of Thoughtfulness unusual
in a Female, which grew with her Growth, and which were in later Years,
developed into stronger Traits by no unnatural means." In 1773 she was
sent away to a school in which she remained three years, varied by
occasional visits at home. She made several friends here, and here, for
the first time, kept a methodical and somewhat extended diary. From this
diary her biographer makes copious extracts. In fact