We would all get our work, sewing or drawing, painting or knitting, or embroidery. My father, and my uncle would each take his particular chair in a shaded corner, and a book would be brought out. It was always a book that had been selected with great care, usually a story, now and again a great missionary book but more often a good novel. And this aunt would usually do the reading. Sometimes my aunt and my mother took turns reading. They both were remarkable readers, and knit close in spirit since early childhood. For two, sometimes three beautiful hours we reveled in the book. Reluctantly, when the word went forth that it was time to stop, we folded up our work and went to bed—sometimes pleading for just another chapter—now and then actually staying up breathless till all hours to finish some great climax. We always went off to rest with a bright eagerness for the morrow and the evening, and the story again—or a new one if we had finished one. So we read the works of George Macdonald—we loved the Scotch, and our readers knew how to put the burr of the dialect upon their tongues—Ian Maclaren, Barrie—much of Dickens, some of Scott, Björnson, William Dean Howells, Jean Ingelow's few matchless novels, Frank Stockton, with his charming absurdities and a host of other writers whose stories seem to have become submerged and forgotten in this day of modern literature. But I look back to those stories as my meeting time with the great of the earth. How real the Bonnie Brier Bush and all its quaint true people were! How tender and strong was the Marquis of Lossie and Sir Gibbie! How I thrilled over the "Men of the Moss Hags," "Ben Hur," "The Virginian," "Jane Eyre." I mention them at random. It is my ambition to some day possess in a special set of shelves, every one of those wonderful stories that thrilled me so when I was young. Oh, don't try to tell me I would not care for them now! I do. They were real books, books that do not change because they told of human life as it is really lived in hearts. They may need to be furnished with a few electric lights and radios and airplanes and automobiles to make them up-to-date, but otherwise you will not find them out of tune with life as it is to-day, except that they are perhaps too clean and wholesome to be natural to-day.