The Children of the Castle

"Hast thou seen that lordly castle,That castle by the sea?Golden and red above itThe clouds float gorgeously."Do you remember GratianGratian Conyfer, the godson of the four winds, the boy who lived at the old farmhouse up among the moors, where these strange beautiful sisters used to meet? Do you remember how full of fancies and stories Gratian's little head was, and how sometimes he put them into words to please Fergus, the lame child he loved so much?The story I am now going to tell you is one of these. I think it was their favourite one. I can not say that it is in the very words in which Gratian used to tell it, for it was not till long, long after those boyish days that it came to be written down. But all the same it is his story.. Aimed at girls too old for fairies and princesses but too young for Austen and the Brontes, books by Molesworth had their share of amusement, but they also had a good deal of moral instruction. The girls reading Molesworth would grow up to be mothers; thus, the books emphasized Victorian notions of duty and self-sacrifice. Typical of the time, her young child characters often use a lisping style, and words may be misspelt to represent children's speech—"jography" for geography, for instance. She took an interest in supernatural fiction. In 1888, she published a collection of supernatural tales under the title Four Ghost Stories, and in 1896 a similar collection of six tales under the title Uncanny Stories. In addition to those, her volume Studies and Stories includes a ghost story entitled "Old Gervais" and her Summer Stories for Boys and Girls includes "Not exactly a ghost story." A new edition of The Cuckoo Clock was published in 1914.