t was first published in this country. The
young man did not seem to know exactly what to think of it, and wanted
another reader's opinion. Few persons could have welcomed those early
writings of Carlyle more enthusiastically than some of us working-girls
did. The very ruggedness of the sentences had a fascination for us,
like that of climbing over loose bowlders in a mountain scramble to get
sight of a wonderful landscape.

My room-mate, the student's sister, was the possessor of an
electrifying new poem,--"Festus,"--that we sat up nights to read. It
does not seem as if it could be more than forty years since Sarah and I
looked up into each other's face from the page as the lamplight grew
dim, and said, quoting from the poem,--

"Who can mistake great thoughts?"

She gave me the volume afterwards, when we went West together, and I
have it still. Its questions and conjectures were like a glimpse into
the chaos of our own dimly developing inner life. The fascination of
"Festus" was that of wonder, doubt, and dissent, with great outbursts
of an overmastering faith sweeping over our minds as we read. Some of
our friends thought it not quite safe reading; but we remember it as
one of the inspirations of our workaday youth.

We read books, also, that bore directly upon the condition of humanity
in our time. "The Glory and Shame of England" was one of them, and it
stirred us with a wonderful and painful interest.

We followed travelers and explorers,--Layard to Nineveh, and Stephens
to Yucatan. And we were as fond of good story-books as any girls that
live in these days of overflowing libraries. One book, a
character-picture from history, had a wide popularity in those days. It
is a pity that it should be unfamiliar to modern girlhood,--Ware's
"Zenobia." The Queen of Palmyra walked among us, and held a lofty place
among our ideals of heroic womanhood, never yet obliterated from
admiring remembrance.

We had the delight of reading Frederika Bremer's "Home" and "Neighbors"
when they were fresh from the fountains of her own heart; and some of
us must not be blamed for feeling as if no tales of domestic life half
so charming have been written since. Perhaps it is partly because the
home-life of Sweden is in itself so delightfully unique.

We read George Borrow's "Bible in Spain," and wandered with him among
the gypsies to whom he seemed to belong. I have never forgotten a verse
that this strange traveler picked up somewh