nsion of the mind.

How little money need be expended to teach a child, and yet what a
quantity of books we have to pay for! Amber had hardly ever looked into
a book, and yet she knew more, that is, had more general useful
knowledge than others who were twice her age. How small was Edward
Forster's little parlour--how humble the furniture it contained!--a
carpet, a table, a few chairs, a small China vase, as an ornament, on
the mantle-piece. How few were the objects brought to Amber's view in
their small secluded home! The plates and knives for dinner, a silver
spoon or two, and their articles of wearing apparel. Yet how endless,
how inexhaustible was the amusement and instruction derived from these
trifling sources!--for these were Forster's books.

The carpet--its hempen ground carried them to the north, from whence the
material came, the inhabitants of the frozen world, their manners and
their customs, the climate and their cities, their productions and their
sources of wealth. Its woollen surface, with its various dyes--each dye
containing an episode of an island or a state, a point of natural
history, or of art and manufacture.

The mahogany table, like some magic vehicle, transported them in a
second to the torrid zone, where the various tropical flowers and fruit,
the towering cocoa-nut, the spreading palm, the broad-leaved banana, the
fragrant pine--all that was indigenous to the country, all that was
peculiar in the scenery and the clime, were pictured to the imagination
of the delighted Amber.

The little vase upon the mantle-piece swelled into a splendid atlas of
eastern geography, an inexhaustible folio, describing Indian customs,
the Asiatic splendour of costume, the gorgeous thrones of the
descendants of the Prophet, the history of the Prophet himself, the
superior instinct and stupendous body of the elephant; all that Edward
Forster had collected of nature or of art, through these extensive
regions, were successively displayed, until they returned to China, from
whence they had commenced their travels. Thus did the little vase, like
the vessel taken up by the fisherman in the Arabian Nights, contain a
giant confined by the seal of Solomon--Knowledge.

The knife and spoon brought food unto the mind as well as to the body.
The mines were entered, the countries pointed out in which they were to
be found, the various metals, their value, and the uses to which they
were applied, The dress again led