out being a
Christian could mean. I saw that it was something which only men and
women could comprehend. And yet they taught me to say those dear words
of the Master, "Suffer the little children to come unto Me!" Surely He
meant what He said. He did not tell the children that they must receive
the kingdom of God like grown people; He said that everybody must enter
into it "as a little child."

But our fathers were stalwart men, with many foes to encounter. If
anybody ever needed a grown-up religion, they surely did; and it became
them well.

Most of our every-day reading also came to us over the sea. Miss
Edgworth's juvenile stories were in general circulation, and we knew
"Harry and Lucy" and "Rosamond" almost as well as we did our own
playmates. But we did not think those English children had so good a
time as we did; they had to be so prim and methodical. It seemed to us
that the little folks across the water never were allowed to romp and
run wild; some of us may have held a vague idea that this freedom of
ours was the natural inheritance of republican children only.

Primroses and cowslips and daisies bloomed in these pleasant
story-books of ours, and we went a-Maying there, with our transatlantic
playmates. I think we sometimes started off with our baskets, expecting
to find those English flowers in our own fields. How should children be
wiser than to look for every beautiful thing they have heard of, on
home ground?

And, indeed, our commonest field-flowers were, many of them,
importations from the mother-country--clover, and dandelions, and
ox-eye daisies. I was delighted when my mother told me one day that a
yellow flower I brought her was a cowslip, for I thought she meant that
it was the genuine English cowslip, which I had read about. I was
disappointed to learn that it was a native blossom, the marsh-marigold.

My sisters had some books that I appropriated to myself a great deal:
"Paul and Virginia;" "Elizabeth, or the Exiles of Siberia;" "Nina: an
Icelandic Tale;" with the "Vicar of Wakefield;" the "Tour to the
Hebrides;" "Gulliver's Travels;" the "Arabian Nights;" and some odd
volumes of Sir Walter Scott's novels.

I read the "Scottish Chiefs"--my first novel when I was about five
years old. So absorbed was I in the sorrows of Lady Helen Mar and Sir
William Wallace, that I crept into a corner where nobody would notice
me, and read on through sunset into moonlight, with eyes blurred with
tears. I d