Amongst the papers which were left to the care of Mrs. Opie's testamentary executor, and from which his daughter framed the memoirs of that charming woman's life, one there was, the fragment of an autobiography, unfortunately never completed, but full of promise. Few lives open with so sweet and poetic a record of childhood's first feelings as this:

“One of my earliest recollections is of gazing on the bright blue sky, as I lay in my little bed, before my hour of rising came, and listening with delighted attention to the ringing of a peal of bells. I had heard that heaven was beyond those blue skies, and I had been taught that there was the home of the good; and I fancied that those sweet bells were ringing in heaven.”

The pious and tender tone of Mrs. Opie's mind is revealed to us in that first sweet and childish impression. She grew up timid, romantic, and fond of excitement, but always full of love and pity. She was afraid of negroes and insane people; but her mother, Mrs. Alderson, judiciously turned the feeling into a compassion which clung to her through life, and of which we find repeated traces in her tales. Her early sympathies were not all bestowed on the oppressed and the sorrowful. Late in life, and in the thee and thou of her Quaker days, we find her writing to a friend,—

“And so thou hast trodden where Robin Hood did! He was one of my heroes when I was young; and at sixteen, when driving through Sherwood Forest, I insisted on getting out to walk through it, and tread where he and his merry men had trodden.”