it was a hopeless attempt. The walls were so high and so dingy, the
little pictures were lost upon them; and the vases on the great black
mantel-shelf looked so insignificant, I felt ashamed of them, and owned
the unfitness of decorating such a room. No flowers would grow in those
cold north windows--no bird would sing in sight of such a street. I gave
it up with a sigh; and there was one good instinct lost.
When I was about eleven, I fell foul of some good books. If it had not
been for them, I truly do not see how I could have known that I was not
to lie or steal, and that God was to be worshipped. Certainly, I had had
hands slapped many times for taking things I had been forbidden to
touch, and had had many a battle in consequence of "telling stories,"
with the servants of the house, but I had always recognized the personal
spite of the punishments, and they had not carried with them any
moral lesson.
I had sometimes gone to church; but the sermons in large city churches
are not generally elementary, and I did not understand those that I
heard at all. Occasionally I went with the nurse to Vespers, and that I
thought delightful. I was enraptured with the pictures, the music, the
rich clothes of the priests; if it had not been for the bad odor of the
neighboring worshippers, I think I might have rushed into the bosom of
the Church of Rome. But that offended sense restrained me. And so, as I
said, if I had not obtained access to some books of holy and pure
influence, and been starved by the dullness of the life around me into
taking hold of them with eagerness, I should have led the life of a
little heathen in the midst of light. Of course the books were not
written for my especial case, nor were they books for children,--and so,
much was supposed, and not expressed, and consequently the truth they
imparted to me was but fragmentary. But it was truth, and the
influence was holy.
I was driven to books; I do not believe I had any more desire than most
vivid, palpitating, fluttering young things of my sex, to pore over a
|