tendency to throw herself into complete sympathy with whatever creature she
touched; and, sometimes,--particularly in tales which came out as serials,
when she wrote from month to month, and had no opportunity of correcting
the composition as a _whole_,--she was apt to give undue prominence to
minor details, and throw her high lights on to obscure corners, instead of
concentrating them on the central point. These artistic rules kept her
humour and pathos,--like light and shade,--duly balanced, and made the
lights she "left out" some of the most striking points of her work.

[Illustration: POST MILL, DENNINGTON.]

But to go back to the stories she told us as children. Another of our
favourite ones related to a Cavalier who hid in an underground passage
connected with a deserted Windmill on a lonely moor. It is needless to
say that, as we were brought up on Marryat's _Children of the New
Forest_, and possessed an aunt who always went into mourning for King
Charles on January 30, our sympathies were entirely devoted to the
Stuarts' cause; and this persecuted Cavalier, with his big hat and
boots, long hair and sorrows, was our best beloved hero. We would
always let Julie tell us the "Windmill Story" over again, when her
imagination was at a loss for a new one. Windmills, I suppose from
their picturesqueness, had a very strong attraction for her. There
were none near our Yorkshire home, so, perhaps, their rarity added to
their value in her eyes; certain it is that she was never tired of
sketching them, and one of her latest note-books is full of the old
mill at Frimley, Hants, taken under various aspects of sunset and
storm. Then Holland, with its low horizons and rows of windmills, was
the first foreign land she chose to visit, and the "Dutch Story," one
of her earliest written efforts, remains an unfinished fragment;
whilst "Jan of the Windmill" owes much of its existence to her early