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Fly-leaf Scribblings 159
No solution was offered, and I studied over the mysterious medley for some time before I saw that it made sense if an E was substituted for each of the dots.
In another of my books, published a dozen years later, is a fly-leaf assertion that
11 weeks will never go away never never never never
What repining and hopeless melancholy in looking forward to the long term just begun !
Some children would fill in with their lead pencils every letter 0 on the page they were studying, and they might even fill in the loops of the ^'s, <^s, and other letters that had enclosed spaces suited to the whim. They delighted also to go over with pencil portions of the illustrations. If imaginative, they were apt to improve the pictures by putting in new features, and would run ropes to the ground from a sailing balloon, draw weather-vanes on the houses, etc.
Toward the end of the spellers was often a page of first names, male and female; and the owner of a book, recognizing some of these as belonging to his friends, was very likely inspired to write in the appropriate surnames, as follows : —
A'bel Chapin Alon'zo Tyler E/i'ska Gunn Ab'by Bliss Nan'cy Steadman |
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