THE APPLE TREE GIRL
have wished that she had been a boy, because she would probably have made a great inventor, or an even greater poet, brought up in such an incomparable environment. Yet on second thoughts I am always glad that she was a girl, because inventors and poets we have in plenty, but never before, I believe, did a girl set out on such a scale as Charlotte did to lead herself, a little Miss Moses, into the Promised Land.
As soon as she had mastered her Third Reader she gradually developed into a bookworm, one of the most industrious little bookworms imaginable.
"She was ten years old then," said Aunt Hepzibah, "a spindly young 'un with her hair in two pigtails, but bright as a button, even if she was so quiet. 'Pears to me there were years when I never see her unless she had a book in her hand. She seemed to live and eat and sleep with the people she read about. Times there'd be tears in her eyes, and
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