Still other opportunities were given to the acutely observing little girl to know the great outside world, its interests, its burdens. There was, for instance, Aunt Mary Hubbard who, returning from San Domingo, opened a vista into a life full of romance and tragedy. This admired aunt braids strangely into the pattern of Harriet’s life, as we shall see in a later chapter. Then Harriet’s father was always off for some tour of theological interest, bringing back a refreshing atmosphere of the outside world. We must also remember that Litchfield was full of young men who came to attend the Law School and who made the town more or less breezy. Among them was a French count who remembered the Beecher family to his latest days. These students and the young ladies of the Academy came from all parts of the country, each adding to the enlargement of life that such a collection of personalities always brings. CHAPTER V THE BOOKS SHE READ It was not a retired and quiet life that Harriet lived during her most formative years. She was on an intellectual highway and at a crossroads where many influences of the richest inspiration were felt. The town attracted fine and interesting people from everywhere; and from all of them she was receiving liberalizing influences that were helping to make of her the great woman that she afterwards became. In such a home circle as that of the Beechers, books were the very breath of life. From 1799, when Lyman Beecher and Roxana Foote were married, they had taken the _Christian Observer_, a paper conducted by Macaulay, Wilberforce and Hannah More, and they had always procured as many books as they could afford of those that were mentioned in that paper. A valuable encyclopedia came to the household as a gift from an English gentleman whose daughters had boarded with the family. This bulky and useful work was not, as is often the case in our day when the public library is just around the corner, left to fall to pieces on the dusty shelf, but it was made a constant source of reference in all their lively discussions. It may be thought that Harriet would have a constant resource in her father’s library. This attic study did indeed afford her a harbor, but his tastes and necessities were naturally for theological works and the walls of his room were fairly choked with tall volumes for his own use. Searching through such a library as this Harriet’s despairing and hungry glances found only such titles as these: Bell’s “Sermons,” Bogue’s “Essays,” Monnet’s “Inquiries,” Toplady on “Predestination,” Housley’s “Tracts”--not such books as would do much toward feeding the beauty-loving instinct of a gifted child.