After this, although I never dared go near her grandmother’s house alone, I yet, by loitering and watching, got many a peep of Elsie. Sometimes I went with Turkey to his mother’s of an evening, to which my father had no objection, and somehow or other Elsie was sure to be there, and we spent a very happy hour or two together. Sometimes she would sing, and sometimes I would read to them out of Milton--I read the whole of Comus to them by degrees in this way; and although there was much I could not at all understand, I am perfectly certain it had an ennobling effect upon every one of us. It is not necessary that the intellect should define and separate before the heart and soul derive nourishment. As well say that a bee can get nothing out of a flower, because she does not understand botany. The very music of the stately words of such a poem is enough to generate a better mood, to make one feel the air of higher regions, and wish to rise “above the smoke and stir of this dim spot”. The best influences which bear upon us are of this vague sort--powerful upon the heart and conscience, although undefined to the intellect. But I find I have been forgetting that those for whom I write are young--too young to understand this. Let it remain, however, for those older persons who at an odd moment, while waiting for dinner, or before going to bed, may take up a little one’s book, and turn over a few of its leaves. Some such readers, in virtue of their hearts being young and old both at once, discern more in the children’s books than the children themselves. CHAPTER XXI The Bees’ Nest