sympathy some elevation of feeling, and that love of reading which has been to me an ‘education.’” “I was not more than twelve years old,” she continues, “I think but ten—­when one winter I read Rollin’s Ancient History.  The walking to our schoolhouse was often bad, and I took my lunch (how well I remember the bread and butter, and ‘nut cake’ and cold sausage, and nuts and apples that made the miscellaneous contents of that enchanting lunch-basket!), and in the interim between morning and afternoon school I crept under my desk (the desks were so made as to afford little close recesses under them) and read and munched and forgot myself in Cyrus’ greatness.”

It is beyond question that the keen relish induced by the scarcity of juvenile reading, together with the sound digestion it promoted, overbalanced in mental gain the novelties of a later day.

The Sedgwick library was probably typical of the average choice in reading-matter of the contemporary American child.  Half a dozen little story-books, Berquin’s “Children’s Friend” (the very form and shade of color of its binding with its green edges were never forgotten by any member of the Sedgwick family), and the “Looking Glass for the Mind” were shelved side by side with a large volume entitled “Elegant Extracts,” full of ballads, fables, and tales delightful to children whose imagination was already excited by the solemn mystery of Rowe’s “Letters from the Dead to the Living.”  Since none of these books except those containing an infusion of religion were allowed to be read on Sunday, the Sedgwick children extended the bounds by turning over the pages of a book, and if the word “God” or “Lord” appeared, it was pounced upon as sanctified and therefore permissible.

Where families were too poor to buy story-books, the children found what amusement they could in the parents’ small library.  In ministers’ families sermons were more plentiful than books.  Mrs. H.B.  Stowe, when a girl, found barrels of sermons in the garret of her father, the Rev. Dr. Beecher, in Litchfield, Connecticut.  Through these sermons his daughter searched hungrily for mental food.  It seemed as if there were thousands of the most unintelligible things.  “An appeal on the unlawfulness of a man’s marrying his wife’s sister” turned up in every barrel by the dozens, until she despaired of finding an end of it.  At last an ancient volume of “Arabian Nights” was unearthed.  Here was the one inexhaustible source of delight to a child so eager for books that at ten years of age she had pored over the two volumes of the “Magnalia.”

The library advantages of a more fortunately placed old-fashioned child we know from Dr. Holmes’s frequent reference to incidents of his boyhood.  He frankly confessed that he read in and not through many of the two thousand books in his father’s library; but he found much to interest him in the volumes of periodicals, especially in the “Annual Register” and Rees’s “Encyclopedia.”