She told me very kindly many things I ought to have learned from my mother, and after that, treated me more like a friend. She lived alone with her father, who was a drunkard, but a man of education, and she had been talked about. I think it was all false. My father never found out about the books she loaned me, but when he learned that I had called on Laura he was angry, and threatened to cowhide me if I ever set foot in her house again; but I did not obey him. I had made a large pocket that I used to tie on under my dress so I could secrete the books. I read in this way a great many works of Scott, Goldsmith, the poems of Shelley, Burns and Tennyson, and ever so many novels. Laura gave me a little tin oil lamp, which I kept supplied with oil out of money that I kept back cent by cent when I sold butter or eggs for my mother. It was wrong, I know, but mother used to cheat father in the same way. He never allowed her to sell butter or cheese for herself, but it was the only way she could get any money. I kept her secret, of course, for there was no sympathy between me and my father. “One day, only two weeks ago, I went to the village against my mother’s wish. I had urged her to let me go for a month in vain, and I could not resist, for I knew there must be a letter from George. To my great disappointment, there was only one, and it had been lying there over three weeks. That night, after I went to bed, while I was reading George’s old letters to make up my loss—they were all the joy I had—” Here poor Annie broke down and cried bitterly. “Poor girl!” said Clara, soothing her. “I am ashamed, papa, that I have ever been unhappy myself, when there is so much misery in the world. Did you ever hear such inhumanity, papa?” “Yes,” he said, “I have heard many similar confessions in my life. For cruelty, bigotry, tyranny to wives and children, commend me to your ignorant, skinflint New England farmer.” Clara told Annie she was exhausted, and had better rest. Susie had been crying half the time. “Oh, let me finish, I beg you. There is little more to tell.”