“Yes, Eugenia, it is too cold for you to sit upstairs,” Mother intervened. With this sudden centring of attention on me at such a crucial time, the clouds burst, the situation was revealed, and I was permitted to go up and have it out. Bitter were my tears. It was exceedingly painful to be seen thus moved. Such things should be suffered in secret. When, shamefaced, I returned to the sitting-room, Sister was not too deep in her book to shoot me a knowing glance, though she had evidently been instructed to hold her peace. After that I would feel the storm coming afar off. I learned to rise calmly; to open the door with less precipitation; sometimes even making an indifferent comment on leaving the room. So deliberate were my movements, I flattered myself that no one suspected I was withdrawing from the family circle in order to dissolve in tears. I would even open a bureau drawer in hopes they would hear the sound through the stove-pipe hole and think I had gone up after something. Oh, the poor, thin artifices of childhood! Looking back and seeing how pitiful they were, an added tenderness wells up within me for my parents who so wisely and kindly refrained from letting me see that my little devices were so ineffectual. There was no village library, though a Temperance Club supplied a circulating one of which I availed myself till I learned to use the Academy library. Then, too, I was a great borrower of books, although we probably had more in our house than the average family in the town; these I read over and over. “Robinson Crusoe” and “The Arabian Nights,” I read surreptitiously in school. I revelled in “The Lady of the Lake,” and “Aurora Leigh.” I was wont to combine reading and housework to the detriment of the latter. While ironing sheets and towels I managed to read at the same time, with long waits between the movements of the iron--unless Mother came suddenly into the room, when I started up briskly, sometimes having to fold inside a scorched place where the iron had rested too long. Many a poem have I committed to memory at the ironing-board. Father started to buy the American Cyclopædia when I was very young--a big undertaking, for they cost five dollars a volume. The volumes came slowly, but we rejoiced whenever a new one was added to the row. It was annoying enough, though, to step up to the book case and find that we had only got to O or P, when we needed volumes containing S or T.