's eyes, and which is
very dear in their memories.

In those days an enchanter, whose name was Jacob Abbott, was writing
wonderful books for young people. None of you will ever have greater
enjoyment in the books written for you now than we girls of that
period had in the Rollo Books, in which Rollo and Lucy, and a pearl
of a hired man named Jonas, and Rollo's father and Rollo's mother,
played important parts. We ate and slept and travelled with Rollo,
we breathed his mountain air, we studied with him, and learned a
great deal about both nature and morals, without suspecting that we
were being taught. Abbott's histories, _Charlemagne_, _Napoleon_,
_Charles I._, _Josephine_, ever so many of them were on my bookshelf,
where I had, a little later, the Waverley Novels; nor shall I ever
forget the breathless pace at which I raced through Macaulay's _History
of England_.

When I was fifteen somebody gave me _Leatherstocking_ and _The Last of
the Mohicans_, and these introduced me to Cooper, whose stories I found
entertaining and full of a feeling of outdoor life. But for sheer
pleasure in a book there never was anything so lovely as the experience
I had, when about ten, in reading Mrs. Sherwood's stories. You girls do
not know much about them, but there were _The Fairchild Family_, and
_Little Henry and his Bearer_, and a thrilling tale, the name of which I
have forgotten, all about a very naughty girl who went to live with an
aunt, who spoiled her to such an extent that when she came home she
couldn't live in peace with her brothers and sisters, and led the whole
family, including her papa and mamma, a perfectly dreadful life. I
remember this story with a great deal of affection, and I think the
heroine's name was Caroline, but I am not sure. _Anna Ross_ was a book
of this period, and it was followed by _The Wide, Wide World_, a _dear_
story, which I hope many of you will read, for it is probably in all
your Sunday-school libraries. It was the work of Miss Susan Warner, who
wrote _Queechy_ and other equally excellent books for girls, after Ellen
Montgomery, her heroine in the first, had stolen our hearts.

I trust none of you will ever be so impolite as I was when I went to
visit my girl friends. I blush to think of it now, after so many years;
but, do you know, if they had a new book, I simply seized upon it, and
never stopped till I read it through, so that as a guest I was of no
use, never waking from my trance until I