A gently moving story for girls. Anna is aged fifteen, and her father needs to go abroad on business for a while. Her mother had died before Anna could remember. Anna is to go to Dornton to stay while her father is away, and she is looking forward to meeting her relatives, including her grandfather, who had been estranged from her father for many years.

The grandfather is living quietly in a small house "with no servants" and has a job as organist in Dornton church. He is well-known as an excellent teacher of music, especially the violin.

The story goes on from there. The book is not a long one, and the audiobook takes a little over four hours.

There doesn’t seem to be much information easily available about Amy Walton. She is not mentioned in “The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature”. She wrote several books, mainly for children, and published over a rather short period of her life, mainly by Blackie.

It is easy to become confused about her, since there was an Amy May Walton writing at about the same time, and also a Mrs. O.F. Walton.

A PDF of scans and an HTML version of this book are provided. We also provide a plain TEXT version and full instructions for using this to make your own audiobook. To find these click on the PDF, HTML or TXT links on the left.

These transcriptions of books by various nineteenth century authors of instructive books for teenagers, were made during the period 1997 to the present day by Athelstane e-Books. Most of the books are concerned with the sea, but in any case all will give a good idea of life in the nineteenth century. This of course includes attitudes prevalent at the time, but frowned upon nowadays.

We used a Hewlett-Packard scanner, a Plustek OpticBook 3600 scanner or a Nikkon Coolpix 5700 camera to scan the pages. We then made a pdf which we used to assist with editing the OCRed text.

To make a text version we used TextBridge Pro 98 or ABBYY Finereader 7 or 8 to produce a first draft of the text, and Athelstane software to find misreads and improve the text. We proof-read the chapters, and then made a CD with the book read aloud by either Fonix ISpeak or TextAloud MP3. The last step enables us to hear and correct most of the errors that may have been missed by the other steps, as well as entertaining us during the work of transcription.

The resulting text can be read at www.athelstane.co.uk