Reading aloud was both a pastime and an education to families in those early days of the Republic.  Although Mrs. Quincy made every effort to procure Miss Edgeworth’s stories for her family because, in her opinion, “they obtained a decided preference to the works of Hannah More, Mrs. Trimmer and Mrs. Chapone,” for reading aloud she chose extracts from Shakespeare, Milton, Addison, and Goldsmith.  Indeed, if it were possible to ask our great-grandparents what books they remembered reading in their childhood, I think we should find that beyond somewhat hazy recollections of Miss Edgeworth’s books and Berquin’s “The Looking Glass for the Mind,” they would either mention “Robinson Crusoe,” Newbery’s tales of “Giles Gingerbread,” “Little King Pippin,” and “Goody Two-Shoes” (written fifty years before their own childhood), or remember only the classic tales and sketches read to them by their parents.

Certainly this is the case if we may take as trustworthy the recollections of literary people whose childhood was passed in the first part of the nineteenth century.  Catharine Sedgwick, for instance, has left a charming picture of American family life in a country town in eighteen hundred—­a life doubtless paralleled by many households in comfortable circumstances.  Among the host of little prigs and prudes in story-books of the day, it is delightful to find in Catharine Sedgwick herself an example of a bookish child who was natural.  Her reminiscences include an account of the way the task of sweeping out the schoolhouse after hours was made bearable by feasts of Malaga wine and raisins.  These she procured from the store where her father kept an open account, until the bill having been rendered dotted over with such charges “per daughter Catharine,” these treats to favorite schoolmates ceased.  Also a host of intimate details of this large family’s life in the country brings us in touch with the times:  fifteen pairs of calfskin shoes ordered from the village shoemaker, because town-bought morocco slippers were few and far between; the excitement of a silk gown; the distress of a brother, whose trousers for fete occasions were remodelled from an older brother’s “blue broadcloth worn to fragility—­so that Robert [the younger brother] said he could not look at them without making a rent;” and again the anticipation of the father’s return from Philadelphia with gifts of necessaries and books.

After seventeen hundred and ninety-five Mr. Sedgwick was compelled as a member of Congress to be away the greater part of each year, leaving household and farm to the care of an invalid wife.  Memories of Mr. Sedgwick’s infrequent visits home were mingled in his daughter’s mind with the recollections of being kept up until nine o’clock to listen to his reading from Shakespeare, Don Quixote, or Hudibras.  “Certainly,” wrote Miss Sedgwick, “I did not understand them, but some glances of celestial light reached my soul, and I caught from his magnetic