the servant, is washing up the breakfast things, and Anne, my youngest sister (Maria was my eldest), is kneeling on a chair, looking at some cakes, which Tabby has been baking for us.”  You cannot beat that for pure simplicity of statement.  There is another fragment that might have come straight out of Jane Eyre.  “One night, about the time when the cold sleet and stormy fogs of November are succeeded by the snowstorms and high piercing night-winds of confirmed winter, we were all sitting round the warm, blazing kitchen fire, having just concluded a quarrel with Tabby concerning the propriety of lighting a candle, from which she came off victorious, no candle having been produced.”  And there is a dream-story that Mr. Clement Shorter gives.  She is in the “Mines of Cracone”, under the floor of the sea.  “But in the midst of all this magnificence I felt an indescribable sense of fear and terror, for the sea raged above us, and by the awful and tumultuous noises of roaring winds and dashing waves, it seemed as if the storm was violent.  And now the massy pillars groaned beneath the pressure of the ocean, and the glittering arches seemed about to be overwhelmed.  When I heard the rushing waters and saw a mighty flood rolling towards me I gave a loud shriek of terror.”  The dream changes:  she is in a desert full of barren rocks and high mountains, where she sees “by the light of his own fiery eyes a royal lion rousing himself from his kingly slumbers.  His terrible eye was fixed upon me, and the desert rang, and the rocks echoed with the tremendous roar of fierce delight which he uttered as he sprang towards me.”  And there is her letter to the editor of one of their Little Magazines:  “Sir,—­It is well known that the Genii have declared that unless they perform certain arduous duties every year, of a mysterious nature, all the worlds in the firmament will be burnt up, and gathered together in one mighty globe, which will roll in solitary splendour through the vast wilderness of space, inhabited only by the four high princes of the Genii, till time shall be succeeded by Eternity; and the impudence of this is only to be paralleled by another of their assertions, namely, that by their magic might they can reduce the world to a desert, the purest waters to streams of livid poison, and the clearest lakes to stagnant water, the pestilential vapours of which shall slay all living creatures, except the bloodthirsty beast of the forest, and the ravenous bird of the rock.  But that in the midst of this desolation the palace of the chief Genii shall rise sparkling in the wilderness, and the horrible howl of their war-cry shall spread over the land at morning, at noontide, and at night; but that they shall have their annual feast over the bones of the dead, and shall yearly rejoice with the joy of victors.  I think, sir, that the horrible wickedness of this needs no remark, and therefore I hasten to subscribe myself, etc.”