Imaginative power in the Taylors illuminated their religious conceptions. In Mrs. Sherwood,[141] it struggled against the formulæ of rigid doctrine. From six to thirteen, she learned her lessons standing in the stocks with an _iron collar_ round her neck. When it was taken off (seldom, she says, till late in the evening), she would run for half a mile through the woods, as if trying to overtake her lost playtime. It says much for the quick recoveries of youth that she was a happy child. Stanford Rectory, where she spent her “golden age”, was surrounded by woods and hills that seem to have become a part of her before the iron collar was imposed. She built huts and made garlands with her brother; they acted fairy tales in the woods: tales of “dragons, enchanters and queens”. She remembered her mother teaching them to read from “a book where there was a picture of a white horse feeding by moonlight”, a print of pure romance. She remembered the wonder-tales told on dark winter evenings by “a person vastly pleasant to children” who came across the park “in a great bushy wig, a shovel hat, and a cravat tied like King William’s bib”.