[Illustration: STORY OF THE AUTHOR'S LIFE]
The author of this little book, Dinah Maria Mulock Craik, was a woman as modest, sweet, and wholesome as the story itself. She lived in England, but her writings endeared her to people all over the world. Some American ladies who went to call upon her in her home, Wildwood Cottage, in Hampstead, near London, describe her as wearing a black silk gown with a plain linen collar, her brown hair drawn smoothly back from an open brow, and her face, gracious and winning to an unusual degree, bearing the look of one who had tasted of sorrow. This was when she was already a well-known writer, having won her place in literature by hard and faithful work; but probably she did not dream, even then, that she would come to be recognized as, next to Dickens, the most widely-read novelist of her time.
She was born April 20, 1826, at Stoke-upon-Trent, one of the chief manufacturing towns of Staffordshire, England. Staffordshire is the central county of England, and has many curious and interesting features. It forms the sloping base of a long chain of hills, where in countless ages the sea, sometimes covering the land and again driven away from it by the upheaval of a great body of earth and stone, has worn down the grit and limestone rock into clay. Did you know that all clay was mud made by the washing away of rocks? Just think how many hundreds of years it took to make the little ball of clay you model with!
Well, the people who lived in this country found out, eighteen hundred years ago, that they could mould their clay into pots and basins, even if they could not make things grow in it; so they dug up the clay, shaped it with their hands, and baked it in the sun, making jars, bowls, and other useful things which they sold to farmers in exchange for food.
About that time there came marching over the thickly wooded land, companies of Roman soldiers, who took all the clay bowls they wanted for their own use, and showed the potters how to make better ones. They also compelled them to make floors, roofs, and wall ornaments of clay baked in very hot ovens, called kilns. Much of this old Roman pottery was, of course, broken and lost, but still, if you should ever go there, you would find pieces of it in the banks of the little rivers and brooks near the clay pits, pieces more than a thousand years old.