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 nature means nearly everything and civilization nearly nothing. The whole purport of Eepersip's existence is simply a healthy nine-year-old consciousness made articulatesomething that an eleven-year-old could recover only by a feat of the memory, and an adult mind only by an improbable tour de force of the imagination. Barbara, in short, designed this curious narrative at the last moment when to do so would have been at all open to her. By no human possibility could it have been in her head at eleven if she had not had it down on paper at nine.

The chief differences, then, between the printed and the destroyed versions represent the inevitable development of the author's taste in minor particulars, and they are these: (1) There is appreciably less of the pursuit-and-escape device, and correspondingly more of the sheer revelling in natural beauty; (2) a great many exact measurements, in the form of dates, distances, rates, heights, and depths, have been omitted as realistic and therefore trivializing; (3) there is a somewhat maturer attempt to keep the fauna and flora consistent with latitude, altitude, and season; and (4) the lapse of time is managed rather more consciously and coherently than it was in the first place. If, in the treatment of these and other