Caroline Southwood Smith's letter to her daughter Gertrude Hill about her youngest daughter Octavia Hill, year 1843

Source:

Life of Octavia Hill as told in her letters (1913), compiled and edited by Charles Edmund Maurice

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Life_of_Octavia_Hill_as_told_in_her_letters/Chapter_1

The letter:

Leeds, 1843.

Ockey learns to read very nicely. She is a very funny little girl; this is the way she talks. "Mama, I am as hot as if I were on the fire." "Mama, I shall never button this shoe if I were to try till the world is knocked down." She says things are as ugly as coal. The other day she told Minnie that she should "like to have a field so large that she could run about in it for ever."