senses),--when I was a little girl, I had the great good fortune to
live in a country village.

I believe I always had a taste for books; but I will pass over that
early period when I manifested it by carrying them to my mouth, and
endeavored to assimilate their contents by the cramming process;
and also that later stage, which heralded the dawn of the critical
faculty, perhaps, when I tore them in bits and held up the tattered
fragments with shouts of derisive laughter. Unlike the critic, no more
were given me to mar; but, like the critic, I had marred a good many
ere my vandal hand was stayed.

As soon as I could read, I had free access to an excellent medical
library, the gloom of which was brightened by a few shelves of
theological works, bequeathed to the family by some orthodox ancestor,
and tempered by a volume or two of Blackstone; but outside of these,
which were emphatically not the stuff my dreams were made of, I can
only remember a certain little walnut bookcase hanging on the wall of
the family sitting-room.

It had but three shelves, yet all the mysteries of love and life and
death were in the score of well-worn volumes that stood there side
by side; and we turned to them, year after year, with undiminished
interest. The number never seemed small, the stories never grew tame:
when we came to the end of the third shelf, we simply went back and
began again,--a process all too little known to latter-day children.

I can see them yet, those rows of shabby and incongruous volumes, the
contents of which were transferred to our hungry little brains. Some
of them are close at hand now, and I love their ragged corners, their