Page:Mrs Elwood 1843.pdf/7

Rh bees, she made herself familiar with those splendid creations of oriental fancy. "The delight of reading these enchanted pages," she observes, "she ever ranked as the most delicious excitement of her life," and to a late friend, she fondly recalled "the delicious odour of the Russian leather in which they were bound, and the charming glance at the numerous pictures which glanced through the half opened leaves" when they were presented to her by her father. Whilst still a child, she would pace for hours up and down a certain lime-walk, in the grounds of Trevor Park, deprecating interruption, "because she had such a beautiful thought in her head;" sometimes in silence, sometimes talking to herself, at others thinking aloud in verse; and at night she would inflict on her brother a long story, or an account of her intended travels; and singular to say, as a moth flits round the flame that is to be its destruction, so Africa, where she was eventually to find an untimely and mysterious death, was the country generally predominant in her mind, as that she most wished to visit. Her father's voyage thither as a young man might possibly have first turned her attention to that quarter of the globe, and this predilection was confirmed by a book which he gave her when a child, called "Silvester Tramper," which quite captivated her youthful fancy with its narratives of lions, bushmen, and other wonderful things. Her brother did not appear, at all times, to have lent a willing ear to the marvellous creations of his sister; as, to induce him to listen to them, she was forced to agree to the bargain, that one day he should hear her stories, and on the following, she was to adopt his amusements. And a fresh stipulation was afterwards made, "that she was