All readers of Kingsley’s Two Years Ago will remember that Mary.
The poets no less than the prose-writers have busied themselves with the small girl. The mere word Duchess to most people calls up a picture of stateliness, yet Browning describes a duchess as follows:—
“She was the smallest lady alive.”
In these days of tall girls small girls are apt to fret. There is one known to me whose case is pitifuller than that of the little fir-tree in Andersen.
That little fir-tree, you will remember, thought of nothing so much as growing. The children sitting beside it would often exclaim, “How pretty and little it is!” It could not bear to hear that, says Andersen.
It is not growing like a tree
In bulk, doth make men better be
Ben Jonson
The case of the little girl known to me is just by so much sadder than that of the little fir-tree that she knows that her growing days are over. When last I saw her she was trying to give length to herself by a long tail to her dress, but the world was not deluded thus, and measured her, as naturalists measure the mouse, “not including the tail.”