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 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