you came here, and I feel my own incapacity so sadly--my own
ignorance so forcibly--I should say so painfully; but that, indeed, is
not my own fault, and that takes the worst pain, you know, out of
things."

"Ignorant!" he said: "of what?"

"Of all these things you talk about. I used to pick up a little from the
newspapers, but now I have done reading them I seem literally to know
nothing."

"Nothing! Nothing about books, I suppose you mean; for you seem to me to
understand men and things better than most people I have met with."

"I have experienced more, perhaps, than most girls of my age have done,
through my poverty and misfortunes; but what is that?"

"Ah, Miss Arnold! what is it but the best part of all knowledge; to
understand one's self and others; the best of all possessions; to
possess one's own spirit. But I beg your pardon, I will only add, that I
do not, by what I say, intend at all to undervalue the advantages of
reading, or the happiness of having a love of reading. Do you love
reading?"

"Why, I don't quite know. I find the books I read aloud to Mrs. Melwyn
often very tiresome, I must confess."

"And what sort of books do you read to Mrs. Melwyn?"

"Why, only two sorts--novels and essays."

He laughed a little, in his quiet way, and then said, "I wonder at any
young lady disliking novels; I thought it was the very reading they
liked best; but as for essays, with very few exceptions, I must own I
share in your distaste for them."

"I can't understand them very often. I am ashamed to say it; but the
writers use such fine language and such strange new words, and then they
go over and over again upon the same thought, and illustrate it twenty
different ways, when one happy illustration, I think, would be so much
better; I like a writer who marches promptly through a subject; those
essayists seem as if they never could have done."

"What you say is just, in many instances, I think. It is a pity you have
not tried other reading. History, travels, poetry; you can not think how
pleasantly such subjects seem to fill and enlarge the mind. And if you
have a little time of your own, you can not easily believe, perhaps, how
much may be done. Even with an hour each day, of steady reading, a vast
deal."

"Ah! but where shall I begin? Every body reads Hume's History of England
first, and I have never even done that; and if I were to begin I should
never get to the end of it."

"Oh, yes, but you would,