I may say that I had something to do with the development of her literary faculty, as I read many good books to her before she could read quite comfortably for herself: Evenings at Home, The Swiss Family Robinson, Gulliver, Robinson Crusoe, books by Ballantyne, Marryat, Mayne Reid, Jules Verne, etc., and Treasure Island, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, The Wreck of the Grosvenor, and then her father's books, or some of them.
But even better than her famous novel were the stories she improvised to me in a small boat which I often rowed up‑stream while she steered—one story, in particular, that had no end; she would take it up at any time.
She had imagined a world where all trees and flowers and vegetation (and some birds) were the size they are now; but men and beasts no bigger than Lilliputians, with houses and churches and buildings to match—and a family called Josselin living in a beautiful house called Marsfield, as big as a piano organ.
Endless were the adventures by flood and field of these little people: in the huge forest and on the gigantic river which it took them nearly an hour to cross in a steam‑launch when the wind was high, or riding trained carrier‑pigeons to distant counties, and the coasts of Normandy, Brittany, and Picardy, where everything was on a similar scale.
It would astonish me to find how vivid and real she could make these imaginations of hers, and to me how fascinating—oddly enough she reserved them for me only, and told no one else.
There was always an immensely big strong man, one Bobby Maurice, a good‑natured giant, nearly three inches high and over two ounces in weight, who among other feats would eat a whole pea at a sitting, and hold out an acorn at arm's‑length, and throw a pepper‑corn over two yards—which has remained the record.
Then, coming back down‑stream, she would take the sculls and I the tiller, and I would tell her (in French) all about our school adventures at Brossard's and Bonzig, and the Lafertés, and the Revolution of February; and in that way she picked up a lot of useful and idiomatic Parisian which considerably astonished Fräulein Werner, the German governess, who yet knew French almost as well as her own language—almost as well as Mr. Ollendorff himself.
She also changed one of the heroes in her famous novel, Tommy Holt, into a French boy, and called him Rapaud!
She was even more devoted to animals than the rest of the family: the beautiful Angora, Kitty, died when Marty was five, from an abscess in her cheek, where she'd been bitten by a strange bull‑terrier; and Marty tearfully wrote her epitaph in a beautiful round hand—
"Here lies Kitty, full of grace;
Died of an abbess in her face!"