y winter day, Edwin Randal, riding home in a sleigh behind his
uncle, saw me in the yard and, picking an apple from an open barrel
beside which he was standing, threw it at me. It was a very large apple,
and as it struck the drift it disappeared leaving a round deep hole.
Delving there I recovered it, and as I brushed the rime from its scarlet
skin it seemed the most beautiful thing in this world. From this vividly
remembered delight, I deduce the fact that apples were not very
plentiful in our home.

My favorite place in winter time was directly under the kitchen stove.
It was one of the old-fashioned high-stepping breed, with long hind legs
and an arching belly, and as the oven was on top, the space beneath the
arch offered a delightful den for a cat, a dog or small boy, and I was
usually to be found there, lying on my stomach, spelling out the
"continued" stories which came to us in the county paper, for I was born
with a hunger for print.

We had few books in our house. Aside from the Bible I remember only one
other, a thick, black volume filled with gaudy pictures of cherries and
plums, and portraits of ideally fat and prosperous sheep, pigs and cows.
It must have been a _Farmer's Annual_ or State agricultural report, but
it contained in the midst of its dry prose, occasional poems like "_I
remember, I remember_," "_The Old Armchair_" and other pieces of a
domestic or rural nature. I was especially moved by The Old Armchair,
and although some of the words and expressions were beyond my
comprehension, I fully understood the defiant tenderness of the lines:

I love it, I love it, and who shall dare
To chide me for loving the old armchair?

I fear the horticultural side of this volume did not interest me, but
this sweetly-sad poem tinged even the gaudy pictures of prodigious plums
and shining apples with a literary glamor. The preposterously plump
cattle probably affected me as only another form of romantic fiction.
The volume also had a pleasant smell, not so fine an odor as the Bible,
but so delectable that I loved to bury my nose in its opened pages. What
caused this odor I cannot tell--perhaps it had been used to press
flowers or sprigs of sweet fern.

Harriet's devotion to literature, like my own, was a nuisance. If my
mother wanted a pan of chips she had to wrench one of us from a book, or
tear us from a paper. If she pasted up a section of _Harper's Weekly_
behind the washstand in the kitchen, I im