When one’s brain is no stronger than mine is, one gets very much confused in disentangling motives and nice points of character.  I have doubted whether Madam Liberality’s besetting virtue were a virtue at all.  Was it unselfishness or love of approbation, benevolence or fussiness, the gift of sympathy or the lust of power, or was it something else?  She was a very sickly child, with much pain to bear, and many pleasures to forego.  Was it, as the doctors say, “an effort of nature” to make her live outside herself, and be happy in the happiness of others?

All my earliest recollections of Julie (as I must call her) picture her as at once the projector and manager of all our nursery doings.  Even if she tyrannized over us by always arranging things according to her own fancy, we did not rebel, we relied so habitually and entirely on her to originate every fresh plan and idea; and I am sure that in our turn we often tyrannized over her by reproaching her when any of what we called her “projukes” ended in “mulls,” or when she paused for what seemed to us a longer five minutes than usual in the middle of some story she was telling, to think what the next incident should be!

It amazes me now to realize how unreasonable we were in our impatience, and how her powers of invention ever kept pace with our demands.  These early stories were influenced to some extent by the books that she then liked best to read—­Grimm, Andersen, and Bechstein’s fairy tales; to the last writer I believe we owed her story about a Wizard, which was one of our chief favourites.  Not that she copied Bechstein in any way, for we read his tales too, and would not have submitted to anything approaching a recapitulation; but the character of the little Wizard was one which fascinated her, and even more so, perhaps, the quaint picture of him, which stood at the head of the tale; and she wove round this skeleton idea a rambling romance from her own fertile imagination.

I have specially alluded to the picture, because my sister’s artistic as well as literary powers were so strong that through all her life the two ever ran side by side, each aiding and developing the other, so that it is difficult to speak of them apart.[2]

[Footnote 2:  Letter, May 14, 1876.]

Many of the stories she told us in childhood were inspired by some fine woodcuts in a German “A B C book,” that we could none of us then read, and in later years some of her best efforts were suggested by illustrations, and written to fit them.  I know, too, that in arranging the plots and wording of her stories she followed the rules that are pursued by artists in composing their pictures.  She found great difficulty in preventing herself from “overcrowding her canvas” with minor characters, owing to her tendency to throw herself into complete sympathy with