a Poet's Garden; collect all the bits
about flowers, and make a 'Poet's Corner' in your garden, admitting no
flower that cannot bring some poetry as its credential. It will make
country life far more enjoyable if you know your poets as Thomas
Holbrook, in 'Cranford,' knew Tennyson."

"I should like all that, Aunt Rachel; but you have not said anything that
sounds like stiff reading yet."

"No; and you ought to have something that will tax all your powers, as
well as this general cultivation, which will be all pleasant. I should
take some really stiff book, on Logic or Political Economy, or Butler's
'Analogy,' and after each morning's work make a careful analysis of the
argument, leaving one side of your MS. book blank, that you may put in
afterwards any illustrations or criticisms of your own, or others, that
may occur to you in the future. I should always keep a stiff book in hand
and treat it so, even if all other regularity and plan in my reading fell
through--it would be a backbone."

"But I shall have so much writing to do if I am to make a commonplace book
on each subject."

"It will make you slower, but much surer. I know a girl who writes a
review of every book she reads, giving extracts, and an abstract of the
argument and her own opinion of it. She finds it most useful, both as
practice in expressing her thoughts and for reference afterwards."

"But it would take so long."

"You would be well repaid, and you would not read any books in your time
for study which were not worth taking trouble with. In reading a book, I
should put a mark to everything that struck me, and at the end of a
chapter should look over the marked bits, and put a second mark to those
parts that seemed specially important, after I had mastered the drift of
the chapter. It would then be easy, when you had finished the book, to
write a review, for you would only look at the doubly marked bits."

"And am I to do no science?"

"I should vary your science with your opportunities, because you have no
strong turn for any one in particular. When you go to town in the winter
for that long visit you should get some cooking lessons, and before you go
you should get the books recommended by the South Kensington Cookery
School, and study the bookwork on the subject. When you go away in the
summer, you should take up geology, or botany, or whatever suits the place
you go to."

"But I shall only have smatterings of things at this rate!"

"Sma