"Two or three old books which lay in the window-seat were explored for my amusement in the tedious winter days. Automathes [80] and Ramsay's Tea-table Miscellany were my favourites, although, at a later period, an odd volume of Josephus's Wars of the Jews divided my partiality."
"Two or three old books in the window-seat," and "an odd volume of Josephus." How entertaining our farm library! (with the Bible, you observe;) and think how much matters have changed for the better: your package down from Mudie's monthly, with all the new magazines, and a dozen of novels; Good Words--as many as you choose,--and Professor Tyndall's last views on the subject of the Regelation of Ice. (Respecting which, for the sake of Scott's first love, and for the sake also of my own first love--which was of snow, even more than water,--I have a few words to say to Professor Tyndall, but they must be for next month, as they will bitterly interrupt our sentimental proceedings.)
Nay--with your professional information that when ice breaks you can stick it together again, you have also imaginative literature of the rarest. Here--instead of Ramsay's Tea-table Miscellany, with its Hardiknute and other ballads of softer tendency,--some of them not the best of their kind, I admit,--here you have Mr. Knatchbull-Huguessen, M.P.'s, Tales at Tea-time, [81] dedicated to the schoolroom teapot, in which the first story is of the "Pea Green Nose," and in which (opening at random) I find it related of some Mary of our modern St. Mary's Lochs, that "Mary stepped forward hastily, when one of the lobsters sprang forward, and seized her arm in his claw, saying, in a low, agitated tone of voice," etc. etc.
You were better off, little as you think it, with that poor library on the window-seat. Your own, at worst, though much fingered and torn;--your own mentally, still more utterly; and though the volume be odd, do you think that, by any quantity of reading, you can make your knowledge of history, even?
You are so proud of having learned to read too, and I warrant you could not read so much as Barbara Haliburton's shield: Or, on a bend azure, three mascles of the first; in the second quarter a buckle of the second. I meant to have engraved it, but shall never get on to aunt Jessie at this rate.