Page:Hannah More (1887 Charlotte Mary Yonge British).djvu/17

Rh enabled to act as interpreter to some French officers, who were living near Bristol as prisoners on parole, during the war of the Austrian Succession, and who frequented Mr. More's house.

The little bright-eyed, quick-witted girl was always picking up information, or writing poems and tales on scraps of paper. Her lesser sister, Martha, always entirely one with her, used to creep down after they were in bed to secure these fragments of paper, and then to hoard them in the housemaid's closet: it was the prime ambition of the pair to possess a whole quire of paper, and when this was given them by the kind mother, it seemed at first inexhaustible. We long to know more of that good mother, who must have been an excellent and wise woman; but she is never again mentioned in the biographies, nor do we even know the date of her death.