But how many, many, many she has withheld that I deserved! I could prize them now; there would be no acid in her words, and it is loss to me that she did not set them all down.

Oh, Susy, you sweet little biographer, you break my old heart with your gentle charities! I think a great deal of her work.

Her canvases are on their easels, and her brush flies about in a care-free and random way, delivering a dash here, a dash there and another yonder, and one might suppose that there would be no definite result; on the contrary I think that an intelligent reader of her little book must find that by the time he has finished it he has somehow accumulated a pretty clear and nicely shaded idea of the several members of this family--including Susy herself--and that the random dashes on the canvases have developed into portraits.

I feel that my own portrait, with some of the defects fined down and others left out, is here; and I am sure that any who knew the mother will recognize her without difficulty, and will say that the lines are drawn with a just judgment and a sure hand.

Little creature though Susy was, the penetration which was born in her finds its way to the surface more than once in these pages.
Before Susy began the Biography she let fall a remark now and then concerning my character which showed that she had it under observation.
In the Record which we kept of the children's sayings there is an instance of this.