Why is this?
Is it that it is born between Wind and Water ?--Wind the father, ever casting himself into multitudinous shapes of invisible tides, taking beauteous form in the sweep of a "lazy-paced cloud," or embodying a transient informing freak in the waterspout, which he draws into his life from the bosom of his mate;--Water, the mother, visible she, sweeping and swaying, ever making and ever unmade, the very essence of her being--beauty, yet having no form of her own, and yet again manifesting herself in the ceaseless generation of passing forms?
If the boat be the daughter of these, the stable child of visible and invisible subtlety, made to live in both, and shape its steady course between their varying and conflicting forces--if her Ideal was modelled between the flap of airy pinions and the long ranging flow of the serpent water, how could the lines of her form fail of grace?
Nor in this case were the magic influences of verse wanting to mould and model a boat which from prow to stern should be lovely and fortunate.

As Pandemonium "Rose like an exhalation, with the sound Of dulcet symphonies and voices sweet," so the little boat grew to the sound of Annie's voice uttering not Runic Rhymes, but old Scotch ballads, or such few sweet English poems, of the new revelation, as floated across her way, and folded their butterfly wings in her memory.
I have already said that reading became a great delight to her.

Mr Cowie threw his library, with very little restriction, open to her; and books old and new were all new to her.

She carried every fresh one home with a sense of riches and a feeling of _upliftedness_ which I can ill describe.

She gloated over the thought of it, as she held it tight in her hand, with feelings resembling, and yet how unlike, those of Johnny Bruce when he crept into his rabbits' barrel to devour the pennyworth of _plunky_ (a preparation of treacle and flour) which his brother would else have compelled him to share.