You will ask, perhaps, if Fanny ever read. Not much. When a child, and learning to read, she had little story-books of good and naughty boys and girls, which she read over and over again—wept over often—but sensible Mrs. Bangs saw no use in all this, and she therefore seldom opened her polished, mahogany book-case. Fanny loved poetry, tender, pathetic poetry; but as she selected only such, and as it always set her crying and sobbing, why, poetry was interdicted too. Mrs. Bangs gave her son several hints on this point; a thing which he soon found out of himself, as Fanny was made perfectly unhappy for a whole week after he had read Keats’s Isabella to her. She had the most tender love for a virtuous and beautiful heroine; the mishaps and death, therefore, which overtook her, were taken to heart with such earnest grief that Mr. Floss, after that, wisely, read all such things to himself. In fact, it soon amounted to this, that he never read aloud at all; for works of wit and fancy were lost on his gentle wife—a repartee she thought must cost somebody pain, and that brought no pleasure to her. While her husband read in the long winter evenings, she sat in her rocking-chair and knitted or sewed; and had many little pleasant chats with one or the other of her sisters or her mother—Fanny was never alone. Let us listen to what she is saying to Robina; raising her voice to its highest pitch, that poor Hannah French, who now and then made one of the evening party, might feel that she was considered as one of the family. “Oh, Robina, dear, what a delightful walk we had. I just went up to the laboratory with Gabriella, to say how do you do to my dear husband, when, there he stood, ready for a walk, (here Mr. Floss laid down his book to listen too) so up the road we went; and the warm sunshine, and the brisk winds seemed to be playing with each other, and gambolling, as it were, before us. We both felt grateful that we did not meet a single beggar or a discontented face. So we walked around our own division and inquired of the widows how they were getting on; and their glad looks, when they saw my husband”—“It was you, Fanny,” said he, interrupting her, “I am certain it was your sweet face, and not my hard, sunburnt one, that made them brighten up so.” “Hannah French, has my husband a hard, sunburnt face?” said Fanny, raising her voice very loud—for she knew how very handsome poor Hannah thought he was. “Sunburnt!” exclaimed Hannah,—“no, indeed—sometimes I have seen it smutted with the stuff which he is cooking over the great pots in his furnace; but he is not sunburnt—he is fire-burnt.”