Europe and elsewhere, by Mark Twain [pseud.] [with an appreciation by Brander Matthews and an introduction by Albert Bigelow Paine]

EUROPE AND ELSEWHERE
ites of hers, and the fact that she could deliver them
with moving effect is proof that her elocution was a
born gift with her, and not a mechanical reproduction of somebody else's art, for a child's parrot-work
does not move. When she was a little creature of
seven years, Sir Walter Scott "would read ballads
to her in his own glorious way, the two getting wild
with excitement over them; and he would take her
on his knee and make her repeat Constance's speeches
in King John till he swayed to and fro, sobbing his
fill." [Dr. John Brown.]
"Sobbing his fill "-that great man-over that little
thing's inspired interpretations. It is a striking picture; there is no mate to it. Sir Walter said of her:
"She's the most extraordinary creature I ever met
with, and her repeating of Shakespeare overpowers
me as nothing else does."
She spent the whole of her little life in a Presbyterian heaven; yet she was not affected by it; she
could not have been happier if she had been in the
other heaven.
She was made out of thunderstorms and sunshine,
and not even her little perfunctory pieties and shopmade holiness could squelch her spirits or put out
her fires for long. Under pressure of a pestering
sense of duty she heaves a shovelful of trade godliness into her journals every little while, but it does
not offend, for none of it is her own; it is all borrowed, it is a convention, a custom of her environment, it is the most innocent of hypocrisies, and
this tainted butter of hers soon gets to be as delicious
to the reader as are the stunning and worldly sin360