Then too I have begun to read regularly with the children; I did it formerly, but only fitfully, and I am sorry to say grudgingly.  But now it has become a matter of intense interest to me, to see how thoughts strike on eager and ingenuous minds.  I find my trained imagination a great help here, because it gives me the power of clothing a bare scene with detail, and of giving vitality to an austere figure.  I have made all sorts of discoveries, to me astonishing and delightful, about my children.  I recognise some of their qualities and modes of thought; but there are whole ranges of qualities apparent, of which I cannot even guess the origin.  One thinks of a child as deriving its nature from its parents, and its experience from its surroundings; but there is much beside that, original views, unexpected curiosities, and, strangest of all, things that seem almost like dim reminiscences floated out of other far-off lives.  They seem to infer so much that they have never heard, to perceive so much that they have never seen, to know so much that they have never been told.  Bewildering as this is in the intellectual region, it is still more marvellous in the moral region.  They scorn, they shudder at, they approve, they love, as by some generous instinct, qualities of which they have had no experience.  “I don’t know what it is, but there is something wrong about Cromwell,” said Maggie gravely, when we had been reading the history of the Commonwealth.  Now Cromwell is just one of those characters which, as a rule, a child accepts as a model of rigid virtue and public spirit.  Alec, whose taste is all for soldiers and sailors just now, and who might, one would have thought, have been dazzled by military glory, pronounced Napoleon “rather a common man.”  This arose purely in the boy’s own mind, because I am very careful not to anticipate any judgments; I think it of the highest importance that they should learn to form their own opinions, so that we never attempt to criticise a character until we have mastered the facts of his life.

Another thing I am doing with them, which seems to me to develop intelligence pleasurably and rapidly, is to read them a passage or an episode, and then to require them to relate it or write it in their own words.  I don’t remember that this was ever done for me in the whole course of my elaborate education; and the speed with which they have acquired the art of seizing on salient points is to me simply marvellous.  I have my reward in such remarks as these which Maud repeated to me yesterday.  “Lessons,” said Alec gravely, “have become ever so much more fun since we began to do them with father.”  “Fun!” said Maggie, with indignant emotion; “they are not lessons at all now!” I certainly do not observe any reluctance on their part to set to work, and I do see a considerable reluctance to stop; yet I don’t think there is the least strain about it.  But it is true that I save them all the stupid and irksome work that made my own acquisition