Harper's Round Table, May 7, 1895 Part 11

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This Department is conducted in the interest of Girls and Young Women, and the Editor will be pleased to answer any question on the subject so far as possible. Correspondents should address Editor.

"Tell you what books I read when I was a little girl?" Molly E---- asks the question. Why, I am delighted to answer you, Molly. I am very fond of the little girl I used to be a long time ago. I can see her now, merrily going to school, day after day, along a river road bordered by tall willow-trees, crossing a bridge, and reaching a pretty little school-house, with windows giving on the pleasant life of a river, which all the year round was beautiful in the children's eyes, and which is very dear in their memories.

In those days an enchanter, whose name was Jacob Abbott, was writing wonderful books for young people. None of you will ever have greater enjoyment in the books written for you now than we girls of that period had in the Rollo Books, in which Rollo and Lucy, and a pearl of a hired man named Jonas, and Rollo's father and Rollo's mother, played important parts. We ate and slept and travelled with Rollo, we breathed his mountain air, we studied with him, and learned a great deal about both nature and morals, without suspecting that we were being taught. Abbott's histories, _Charlemagne_, _Napoleon_, _Charles I._, _Josephine_, ever so many of them were on my bookshelf, where I had, a little later, the Waverley Novels; nor shall I ever forget the breathless pace at which I raced through Macaulay's _History of England_.

When I was fifteen somebody gave me _Leatherstocking_ and _The Last of the Mohicans_, and these introduced me to Cooper, whose stories I found entertaining and full of a feeling of outdoor life. But for sheer pleasure in a book there never was anything so lovely as the experience I had, when about ten, in reading Mrs. Sherwood's stories. You girls do not know much about them, but there were _The Fairchild Family_, and _Little Henry and his Bearer_, and a thrilling tale, the name of which I have forgotten, all about a very naughty girl who went to live with an aunt, who spoiled her to such an extent that when she came home she couldn't live in peace with her brothers and sisters, and led the whole family, including her papa and mamma, a perfectly dreadful life. I remember this story with a great deal of affection, and I think the heroine's name was Caroline, but I am not sure. _Anna Ross_ was a book of this period, and it was followed by _The Wide, Wide World_, a _dear_ story, which I hope many of you will read, for it is probably in all your Sunday-school libraries. It was the work of Miss Susan Warner, who wrote _Queechy_ and other equally excellent books for girls, after Ellen Montgomery, her heroine in the first, had stolen our hearts.

I trust none of you will ever be so impolite as I was when I went to visit my girl friends. I blush to think of it now, after so many years; but, do you know, if they had a new book, I simply seized upon it, and never stopped till I read it through, so that as a guest I was of no use, never waking from my trance until I had finished the last page of the treasure. Finally one of my friends, Jenny V. G., devised this plan, and carried it out successfully: When she expected me to visit her for a week, she living in the country and I in town, she simply _hid_ all the books which she knew I had not read, and never brought them out till I had gone home again.

You see, my dears, I was not a pattern for you to imitate. There was not a paper in existence in my childhood worthy of being compared with the Round Table; but at our school we wrote a weekly paper, contributed to it ourselves, and made a half-dozen copies to pa.s.s around. I began being an editor quite early in life.

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