"Never, never, read a bad book, my child," she said. "You thereby do yourself an incalculable injury. We have not the power of forgetting anything. However deeply our impressions may be covered by others, they are still in existence, and likely to be revived at any time. No man can touch pitch and not be defiled, and no one can read and take pleasure in a bad book without being led into sin. You become like what your mind dwells upon. 'As a man thinketh, so is he.' Thus by thinking of and meditating upon the deeds of good men, and more especially those of our dear Lord, we are made like them, and are changed into the same image. This caution in reading is especially needful to you, my Vevette, as you are by nature facile and easily impressed." "But, maman, why does my uncle send such books?" I ventured to ask. My mother sighed. "Your uncle, my love, does not think of such things as I do. He lives in the world of the court, where these things which your father and I consider all-important are but little regarded, or, if thought of at all, are considered as subjects for mockery." "But, maman, I thought all English people were of the Religion. I thought they used the beautiful prayers in your prayer-book." My mother sighed again. "That is true, my child, but it is possible to hold the truth in unrighteousness. Here, where to be of the Religion is to put one's neck into the halter, there is no temptation to the careless and dissolute to join our numbers. Yet even here, under the very cross of persecution, the church is far from perfect. But we will talk more another time." I was so penitent and so humbled in my own eyes that I made no objection when my mother deprived me of my two grand sources of amusement, the "Arcadia" of Sir Philip Sidney, and Mr. Edmund Spenser's "The Faerie Queene," telling me that she should not let me have them again for a month. I am somewhat inclined to doubt the wisdom of this measure. I know it threw me back upon myself for amusement in the hours when I was deprived of my mother's society, and left me more time to meditate, or rather, I should say, to dream of that fairy-land to which the volume of plays had introduced me. However, I had them back again at the end of a fortnight, and with them a new book—a great quarto volume of voyages and travels, with several historical pieces, collected by Mr. Hackluyt, formerly a preacher to Queen Elizabeth. This gave a new turn to my thoughts. I rejoiced in the destruction of the great Armada, and wept while I exulted over the glorious death of Sir Richard Greville, and travelled to the Indies and the New World and dreamed over their marvels.