This name could certainly be applied to her father’s study. Harriet loved that attic of her father’s with its quiet and its rows of books. There she would cuddle down in a corner and watch her father as he sat in his great writing chair with his Bible and his Cruden’s “Concordance” and now and then whispered out his rapidly forming sermon. She looked about upon those mysterious books with awe. To her father there was evidently good magic in them, but to her their charm was unrevealed. To be sure, from Harmer’s work on “Solomon’s Song” and from a book called “The State of the Clergy during the French Revolution,” she could gain some food for her hungry fancy. There was also Cotton Mather’s “Magnalia,” that wonderful account of how this plantation of New England was made so considerable in a space of time so inconsiderable, a work that was a perfect storehouse of tales of these strange old days. These were wonderful stories indeed! And they were all about her own country, too, and made her feel that she herself trod upon ground that was consecrated by some special dealings of God’s Providence. Nevertheless the story-loving side of little Harriet could never be convinced that there were no more lively bits to be found among all those unpromising black books. She sought perseveringly, and her efforts were rewarded. In a side closet full of documents there was a weltering ocean of pamphlets in which she dug and toiled for hours, to be repaid by disinterring a delicious morsel of “Don Quixote” that had once been a book, but was now lying in forty or fifty broken scraps amid Calls and Appeals, Essays, Replies and Rejoinders. The turning up of such a fragment, she thought, was like the rising of an enchanted island out of an ocean of mud. Further searches in certain barrels of old sermons brought to her a battered but precious copy of the “Arabian Nights.” She was now happy; such books as these could be read and re-read forever without ever palling. We must remember that there were in those days no books written specially for children and so arranged as to be interesting at each step of the child’s growth. Harriet had to grow to the great books, but as she had a very precocious and devouring mind she was fully ready by the time that she discovered the Oriental story-book in the bottom of the barrel, to read all the big words in _Scheherazade’s_ long-winded, fascinating tales. It was Harriet Beecher’s good fortune that no silly or trashy books were thrown in her way, to the injury or ruin of her mental development. Under all these encouraging influences she grew with astonishing rapidity, but in a perfectly simple and normal way.