he world, but never, till he appeared,
to be read by mortal man. It is this passion which must be nurtured in
our childhood, for upon its healthy growth and vigour depends the future
expansion of the mind.
How little money need be expended to teach a child, and yet what a
quantity of books we have to pay for! Amber had hardly ever looked into
a book, and yet she knew more, that is, had more general useful
knowledge than others who were twice her age. How small was Edward
Forster's little parlour--how humble the furniture it contained!--a
carpet, a table, a few chairs, a small China vase, as an ornament, on
the mantel-piece. How few were the objects brought to Amber's view in
their small secluded home! The plates and knives for dinner, a silver
spoon or two, and their articles of wearing apparel. Yet how endless,
how inexhaustible was the amusement and instruction derived from these
trifling sources!--for these were Forster's books.
The carpet--its hempen ground carried them to the north, from whence
the material came, the inhabitants of the frozen world, their manners
and their customs, the climate and their cities, their productions and
their sources of wealth. Its woollen surface, with its various
dyes--each dye containing an episode of an island or a state, a point of
natural history, or of art and manufacture.
The mahogany table, like some magic vehicle, transported them in a
second to the torrid zone, where the various tropical flowers and fruit,
the towering cocoa-nut, the spreading palm, the broad-leaved banana, the
fragrant pine--all that was indigenous to the country, all that was
peculiar in the scenery and the clime, were pictured to the imagination
of the delighted Amber.
The little vase upon the mantel-piece swelled into a splendid atlas of
eastern geography, an inexhaustible folio describing Indian customs, the
Asiatic splendour of costume, the gorgeous thrones of the descendants of
the Prophet, the history of the Prophet himself, the superior instinct
and stupendous body of the elephant; all that Edward Forster had
collected of nature or of art, through these extensive regions, were
successively displayed, until they returned to China, from whence they
had commenced their travels. Thus did the little vase, like the vessel
taken up by the fisherman in the "Arabian Nights," contain a giant
confined by the seal of Solomon--Knowledge.
The knife and spoon brought food unto the mind as well as to the
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