She resumed, her face glowing with sudden rapture: "There are six books--half a dozen! Maybe you've heard of some of them. Bill's read 'em over lots of times. He begins with the first on the shelf and when he's through the row, he just takes 'em up, all over again. I like to read parts of them--the interesting parts. This is the way they stand on the shelf: The Children of the Abbey--that's Bill's favorite; The Scottish Chiefs, David Copperfield, The Talisman, The Prairie, The Last of the Mohicans." "I like The Children of the Abbey best, too," observed Brick Willock thoughtfully. "Lahoma, she's read 'em all to me; that's the way we get through the winter months. They's something softening and enriching about that there Children of the Abbey; and Scottish Chiefs has got some mighty high work in it, too. I tells Lahoma that I guess them two books is just about as near the real thing out in the big world as you can get. David Copperfield is sort of slow; I've went with people that knowed a powerful sight more than them characters in David. I used to drift about with a bunch of fellows that Uriah Heep couldn't have stood up against for five minutes. The Talisman is noble doings, too, but not up-to-date. As for The Prairie and The Last of the Mohicans, them is dissatisfying books,--they make you think, being as you lives in just such quarters, interesting things might happen most any minute--and they never does." "Why, Brick!" Lahoma reproached him. "THIS has happened--" she nodded at Wilfred Compton. "Don't you call that interesting?" "That's the way _I_ discusses them books," returned Willock with manifest satisfaction. "I wasn't never no man to be overawed by no book, which, however high and by whoever wrote, ain't no more like life than a shadow in a pool. Try to grab that shadow, and where is it? Just to go out after game and climb the mountains all day and come home of an evening to sit down to a plate of bacon and eggs, and another of the same, with coffee smoking on the little stove, and Lahoma urging on the feast--that's more of real living than you'd get out of a big library. Ain't it, Bill?" "Now WE want to talk, Brick," interposed Lahoma--"don't we, Wilfred?" "So your cabin was built," Wilfred prompted her, "and the men took the dugout."