er read "East Lynne" aloud, because, I gathered,
she considered it "improper"; and Miss Braddon's "Lady Audley's Secret"
came under the same ban, though I heard it talked of frequently. It was
difficult to discover where my mother drew the line between what was
"proper" and what was "not proper." Shakespeare she seemed to regard as
eminently proper, and, I noticed, hesitated and mumbled only when she
came to certain parts of Ophelia's song. It seems strange now that I
never rated Mrs. Henry Wood's novels with those of George Eliot or
Thackeray or Dickens. There seemed to be some imperceptible difference
which my mother never explained, but which I, instinctively, understood;
and when Anthony Trollope's "Orley Farm" was read, I placed him above
Mrs. Henry Wood, but not on an equality with Dickens or Thackeray.

_Harper's Magazine_, in those days, contained great treasure! There, for
instance, were the delightful articles by Porte Crayon--General
Strothers, I think. These one listened to with pleasure; but the bane of
my existence was Mr. Abbott's "Life of Napoleon Bonaparte." It seemed to
me as if it would never end, and it stretched as dolorously before me as
that other fearful process which appalled my waking days--the knowledge
that all my life I should be obliged to clean my teeth three times a day
with powdered charcoal!

After a time, I began to read for myself; but the delights of desultory
reading were gloomed by the necessity of studying long lessons that no
emancipated child of to-day would endure. Misguided people sometimes
came to the school and told childish stories, at which we all laughed,
but which even the most illiterate despised. To have known George
Warrington, to have mingled familiarly in the society of George
Washington, to remember the picture of Beatrix Esmond coming down the
stairs--I am not speaking of Du Maurier's travesties of that delightful
book--to have seen the old ladies in "Cranford," sucking their oranges
in the privacies of their rooms, made one despise foolish little tales
about over-industrious bees and robins which seemed not even to have the
ordinary common sense of geese!

Suddenly, my mother became a devout Catholic. The scene changed. On one
unhappy Sunday afternoon "Monte Cristo" was rudely snatched from my
entranced hands. Dumas was on the list of the "improper," and to this
day I have never finished the episodes in which I was so deeply
interested. Now the wagon of the cir