e 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.

Another valuable part of his education was the gracious influence in
his aunt's household, the spirit of candor, of affection, and the sane
common-sense with which life was regarded, the simplicity of its faith
and the patience with which trials were borne. The lessons he learned in
it had more practical influence in his life than all the books he read.
Nor were his opportunities for the study of character so meagre as
the limit of one family would imply. As often happens in New England
households, individualities were very marked, and from his stern uncle
and his placid aunt down to the sweet and nimble-witted Alice, the
family had developed traits and even eccentricities enough to make it a
sort of microcosm of life. There, for instance, was Patience, the maiden
aunt, his father's sister, the news-monger of the fireside, whose
powers of ratiocination first gave Philip the Greek idea and method of
reasoning to a point and arriving at truth by the process of exclusion.
It did not excite his wonder at the time, but afterwards it appeared to
him as one of the New England eccentricities of which the novelists make
so much. Patience was a home-keeping body and rarely left the premises
except to go to church on Sunday, although her cheerfulness and social
helpfulness were tinged by nothing morbid. The story was--Philip learned
it long afterwards--that in her very young and frisky days Patience had
one evening remained out at some merry-making very late, and in fact had
been escorted home in the moonlight by a young gentleman when the
tall, awful-faced clock, whose face her mother was watching, was on the
dreadful stroke of eleven. For this delinquency her mother had reproved
her, the girl thought unreasonably, and she had quickly replied,
"Mother, I will never go out again." And she never did. It was in fact a
renunciation of the world, made apparently without rage, and adhered to
with che