It was all scattered at the time of the winding up of the farm estate,
and the only jetsam that Philip inherited out of it was an annotated
copy of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, Young's Travels in France, a
copy of The Newcomes, and the first American edition of Childe
Harold. Probably these odd volumes had not been considered worth any
considerable bid at the auction. From his mother, who was fond of books,
and had on more than one occasion, of the failure of teachers, taught
in the village school in her native town before her marriage, Philip
inherited his love of poetry, and he well remembered how she used to try
to inspire him with patriotism by reading the orations of Daniel Webster
(she was very fond of orations), and telling him war stories about
Grant and Sherman and Sheridan and Farragut and Lincoln. He distinctly
remembered also standing at her knees and trying, at intervals, to
commit to memory the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. He had learned it all
since, because he thought it would please his mother, and because there
was something in it that appealed to his coming sense of the mystery
of life. When he repeated it to Celia, who had never heard of it, and
remarked that it was all made up, and that she never tried to learn a
long thing like that that wasn't so, Philip could see that her respect
for him increased a little. He did not know that the child got it out
of the library the next day and never rested till she knew it by heart.
Philip could repeat also the books of the Bible in order, just as glibly
as the multiplication-table, and the little minx, who could not brook
that a country boy should be superior to her in anything, had surprised
her mother by rattling them all off to her one Sunday evening, just as
if she had been born in New England instead of in New York. As to the
other fine things his mother read him, out of Ruskin and the like;
Philip chiefly remembered what a pretty glow there was in his mother's
face when she read them, and that recollection was a valuable part of
the boy's education.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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