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| Portfolio Package © Hastings Walsh (2016) |
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Juliet M. Soskice (granddaughter of British Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown), Chapters From Childhood: Reminiscences of an Artist's Granddaughter. New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1922, p. 14—
I felt sorry for Mary [her seven-year-old cousin, whose father was British writer and critic William Michael Rossetti, brother of Dante Gabriel Rossetti]… She often used to get anxious about things. She liked digging up remains in the back garden and wondering what they were. Once she dug up some bones and was certain they belonged to a victim who had been buried by a murderer, as you read about in the paper. She was very frightened, but Helen [Mary's older sister] said no, they were some chicken bones abandoned by the cat; and so they were. And she dug up a scrap of paper, and was sure she could see traces of a mysterious message written in it, but we couldn't see anything. We put it under the microscope, and there was nothing written on it at all. But she said she could see it, so she kept it. When she dug up an old piece of glass or tin she used to believe they were Roman remains, because she said she was sure it was the Romans who had begun to build the waterworks at the foot of Primrose Hill. She didn't believe it really, but she wanted to so much that she almost did. She wasn't very brave, and she used to cry a good deal because she was always frightened by the grave things Helen talked about.
