A very amusing circumstance in connection with Mrs. Somerville’s
   acquaintance with Sir Walter arose out of the childish inquisitiveness
   of Woronzow Greig, Mrs. Somerville’s little boy.

During the time Mrs. Somerville was visiting Abbotsford the Waverley Novels were appearing, and were creating a great sensation; yet even Scott’s intimate friends did not know that he was the author; he enjoyed keeping the affair a mystery.  But little Woronzow discovered what he was about.  One day when Mrs. Somerville was talking about a novel that had just been published, Woronzow said, ’I knew all these stories long ago, for Mr. Scott writes on the dinner-table; when he has finished he puts the green cloth with the papers in a corner of the dining-room, and when he goes out Charlie Scott and I read the stories.’

Phyllis Browne remarks that this incident shows ’that persons who want to keep a secret ought to be very careful when children are about’; but the story seems to me to be far too charming to require any moral of the kind.

Bound up in the same volume is a Life of Miss Mary Carpenter, also written by Phyllis Browne.  Miss Carpenter does not seem to me to have the charm and fascination of Mrs. Somerville.  There is always something about her that is formal, limited, and precise.  When she was about two years old she insisted on being called ‘Doctor Carpenter’ in the nursery; at the age of twelve she is described by a friend as a sedate little girl, who always spoke like a book; and before she entered on her educational schemes she wrote down a solemn dedication of herself to the service of humanity.  However, she was one of the practical, hardworking saints of the nineteenth century, and it is no doubt quite right that the saints should take themselves very seriously.  It is only fair also to remember that her work of rescue and reformation was carried on under great difficulties.  Here, for instance, is the picture Miss Cobbe gives us of one of the Bristol night-schools: 

It was a wonderful spectacle to see Mary Carpenter sitting patiently before the large school gallery in St. James’s Back, teaching, singing, and praying with the wild street-boys, in spite of endless interruptions caused by such proceedings as shooting marbles at any object behind her, whistling, stamping, fighting, shrieking out ‘Amen’ in the middle of a prayer, and sometimes rising en masse and tearing like a troop of bisons in hob-nailed shoes down from the gallery, round the great schoolroom, and down the stairs, and into the street.  These irrepressible outbreaks she bore with infinite good humour.

Her own account is somewhat pleasanter, and shows that ’the troop of bisons in hob-nailed shoes’ was not always so barbarous.