was not put up again, however. She cried with anger, unless her hands
were continually washed with lavender water, and made little pellets
of cotton which she stuffed in her ears and nose, so that she might
not hear or smell.

I went to Dr. Snell's as soon as I was able. He was in his bedchamber,
writing a sermon on fine note-paper, and had disarranged the wide
ruffles of his shirt so that he looked like a mildly angry turkey.
Thrusting his spectacles up into the roots of his hair, he rose,
and led me into a large room adjoining his bedroom, which contained
nothing but tall bookcases, threw open the doors of one, pushed up a
little ladder before it, for me to mount to a row of volumes bound in
calf, whose backs were labeled "British Classics." "There," he said,
"you will find 'The Spectator,'" and trotted back to his sermon, with
his pen in his mouth. I examined the books, and selected Tom Jones and
Goldsmith's Plays to take home. From that time I grazed at pleasure in
his oddly assorted library, ranging from "The Gentleman's Magazine"
to a file of the "Boston Recorder"; but never a volume of poetry
anywhere. I became a devourer of books which I could not digest, and
their influence located in my mind curious and inconsistent relations
between facts and ideas.

My music lessons in Milford were my only task. I remained inapt, while
Veronica played better and better; when I saw her fingers interpreting
her feelings, touching the keys of the piano as if they were the
chords of her thoughts, practice by note seemed a soulless, mechanical
effort, which I would not make. One day mother and I were reading the
separate volumes of charming Miss Austen's "Mansfield Park," when a
message arrived from Aunt Mercy, with the news of Grand'ther Warren's
dangerous illness. Mother dropped her book on the floor, but I turned