Here is Maidie’s first letter, before she was six.  The spelling is unaltered, and there are no “commoes.”

“MY DEAR ISA,—­I now sit down to answer all your kind and beloved letters which you was so good as to write to me.  This is the first time I ever wrote a letter in my Life.  There are a great many Girls in the Square, and they cry just like a pig when we are under the painfull necessity of putting it to Death.  Miss Potune, a Lady of my acquaintance, praises me dreadfully.  I repeated something out of Dean Swift, and she said I was fit for the stage, and you may think I was primmed up with majestick Pride, but upon my word I felt myselfe turn a little birsay,—­birsay is a word which is a word that William composed which is as you may suppose a little enraged.  This horrid fat simpliton says that my Aunt is beautifull, which is intirely impossible, for that is not her nature.”

What a peppery little pen we wield!  What could that have been out of the Sardonic Dean?  What other child of that age would have used “beloved” as she does?  This power of affection, this faculty of beloving, and wild hunger to be beloved comes out more and more.  She perilled her all upon it, and it may have been as well—­we know, indeed, that it was far better—­for her that this wealth of love was so soon withdrawn to its one only infinite Giver and Receiver.  This must have been the law of her earthly life.  Love was indeed “her Lord and King”; and it was perhaps well for her that she found so soon that her and our only Lord and King Himself is Love.

Here are bits from her Diary at Braehead:  “The day of my existence here has been delightful and enchanting.  On Saturday I expected no less than three well-made Bucks, the names of whom is here advertised.  Mr. Geo. Crakey (Craigie), and Wm. Keith, and Jn.  Keith,—­the first is the funniest of every one of them.  Mr. Crakey and walked to Craky-hall (Craigiehall), hand in hand in Innocence and matitation (meditation) sweet thinking on the kind love which flows in our tender-hearted mind which is overflowing with majestic pleasure no one was ever so polite to me in the hole state of my existence.  Mr. Craky you must know is a great Buck, and pretty good-looking.

“I am at Ravelston enjoying nature’s fresh air.  The birds are singing sweetly, the calf doth frisk, and nature shows her glorious face.”

Here is a confession:  “I confess I have been very more like a little young divil than a creature for when Isabella went up stairs to teach me religion and my multiplication and to be good and all my other lessons I stamped with my foot and threw my new hat which she had made on the ground and was sulky and was dreadfully passionate, but she never whiped me but said Marjory go into another room and think what a great crime you are committing letting your temper git the better of you.  But I went so sulkily that the Devil got the better of me but she never never never whips me so that I think I would be the better of it and the next time that I behave ill I think she should do it for she never never does it....  Isabella has given me praise for checking my temper for I was sulky even when she was kneeling an hole hour teaching me to write.”