As a girl I had a pastime of my own, a kind of mental book-collecting: Going along the streets I would say to myself, “What books will you have from this house?--you may have any three you choose.” Then the fun would begin. At Grandpa’s were “Timothy Titcomb’s Letters,” and “Bitter Sweet,” and a queer little book called “Aristotle’s Masterpiece”; at an uncle’s were Walton’s “Compleat Angler,” “Reveries of a Bachelor,” and “Lewie, or The Bended Twig”; at an aunt’s was “Right and Wrong, or She Told the Truth at Last”--a fascinating big, green-covered book that I used to weep over, pitying the heroine entangled in an intricate web of deceit. At another aunt’s were “Wells’s Science of Common Things” and “Sexual Science; or Love, its Powers and Uses,” by O. S. Fowler. I valued the “Science of Common Things” because it asked and answered questions about a lot of things I thought I ought to know, and did not know, and never could study out, even with the help of physics--always a hard study for me; and I liked the book of Fowler’s because it dealt with the alluring subject in a lofty and, as I thought then, scientific way. At still another aunt’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” and Byron’s Poems leaned confidingly against each other, except when I disturbed them. Bunyan was the favourite then, and for that matter is yet. At the homes of neighbours and friends were many coveted treasures--the Embury Poems, “Physiognomy and Signs of Character” (this I borrowed for months at a time), Moore’s Melodies, Longfellow’s Poems, Shakespeare, “Fern Leaves,” and many more. I thought one man in town very literary because he had all of E. P. Roe’s works; at one time “Barriers Burned Away” and “Opening of a Chestnut Bur” seemed wonderful productions, and (I may as well confess it) I adored the novels of Mary Jane Holmes. Though forbidden to read them, I borrowed them of our slatternly red-haired neighbour, devouring them on the sly. I read “Darkness and Daylight” twice or thrice, and five or six others by the same author. The only times I can remember Father’s voice raised in sternness to me were when he caught me absorbed in novels by that wicked Mrs. Holmes. (Mother told me he himself once sat up all night at a hotel to read “Lena Rivers,” and that he had wanted to name me “Lena.”)