Little Mary Todd was all storm and sunshine. It wasn't that she really meant to be naughty, but she was like Snowball, her pony—she could be led, but not driven. So when Mammy told her to be a little lady, it put her back up. She stamped her foot and ran away. She jumped on Snowball and rode to Ashland, the house of her friend Mr. Henry Clay. There nobody told her to be a little lady—so of course she was. She charmed Mr. Clay's friends with her sweetness and poise.

And when her father brought home his lovely bride to be Mary's new mother, Mary meant to welcome her in her prettiest dress with her sweetest smile. She had got all dressed up when she saw that lovely new pile of mud in the back yard—and she just had to see what kind of mud pies it would make. "Mary Ann Todd!" shouted her father furiously when he saw her muddy face. "Robert Smith Todd!" she shouted back, just as mad as he was.

Well, that was the terrible Todd temper, and all the Todd children had it. Ma could hardly get used to their squabbles. But they loved one another dearly too, and quickly made up. The big, handsome Todd house in Lexington was a very lively place. There were parties and picnics and visits and all sorts of good times.

There was hard work too. Mary went to a school whose master believed the brain worked best when the body was hungry. So she had to be there at five o'clock in the morning and she didn't have breakfast till seven. That led to a funny adventure. A policeman chased her to school one morning, thinking that she was eloping.

By the time she had finished boarding school, where she was chosen to write a play in French and take part in it, Mary had blossomed from a mischievous tomboy into a beautiful, talented young lady of seventeen. When she visited her older sister, now married and living in Springfield, Illinois, it was no wonder that she had many eligible suitors. Some were surprised that she chose a tall, awkward lawyer with a plain face, and little money. But she divined the greatness of his heart, and as Abraham Lincoln's wife, she became first lady of the land. In the tragic war years, she was divided from her beloved family in the South, and was tried by many griefs, but she was steadfast in her loyalty to her husband and the Union he struggled to preserve.

For Katharine Wilkie, who wrote the boyhood stories of Zachary Taylor and William Clark for the Childhood of Famous American Series, this book has been a labor of love. Living in Mary Todd's home town, she retraced nearly every step of her young heroine in the Lexington of more than a hundred years ago. Her sunny, lively story of Mary Todd Lincoln's girlhood reflects with charm and warmth a nature whose very faults were lovable. Spunky and sweet, proud, gracious and gay, impulsive and generous, Mary was a very human, very winning and winsome girl of the Bluegrass.

From the dust jacket