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." Although apparently allowed to
choose from the book-shelves, there were frequent evidences of a
parent's careful supervision. "I remember," he once wrote to a friend,
"many leaves were torn out of a copy of Dryden's Poems, with the comment
'Hiatus haud diflendus,' but I had like all children a kind of Indian
sagacity in the discovery of contraband reading, such as a boy carries
to a corner for perusal. Sermons I had enough from the pulpit. I don't
know that I ever read one sermon of my own accord during my childhood.
The 'Life of David,' by Samuel Chandler, had adventures enough, to say
nothing of gallantry, in it to stimulate and gratify curiosity."
"Biographies of Pious Children," wrote Dr. Holmes at another time, "were
not to my taste. Those young persons were generally sickly, melancholy,
and buzzed around by ghostly comforters or discomforters in a way that
made me sick to contemplate." Again, Dr. Holmes, writing of the revolt
from the commonly accepted religious doctrines he experienced upon
reading the Rev. Thomas Sc