She adds Dickens, Poe, Alcott, Whittier as starred favorites.
In a list of twenty books, a Colorado girl stars a large number. The list is headed by "The Library of the World's Greatest Books." Then she mentions:
_Laddie_ _Freckles_ _Girl of the Limberlost_ _Barriers Burned Away_ _Lady of the Lake_ _As a Man Thinketh_ _The Choir Invisible_ _Little Women_
Her list includes also the Life of John Bunyan, the Life of Christ, the works of George Eliot and of Burns, and many more standard and popular books. She has had a course at college and reads the U. S. Bureau of Agriculture Bulletins.
_At the Foot of the Rainbow_ _Promised Land_ _Friar Tuck_ _Treasure Island_ _King of the Golden River_ _Water Babies_ _The Crisis_ _The Varmint_ Set of Kipling Set of W. Irving
She includes also Riley, E. B. Browning, Wordsworth, Burns.
One writer who lives sixty miles from any kind of library is so fortunate as to have all of Dickens, Scott, Shakespeare, and a copy of Longfellow, Tennyson and Browning. "I have," she says, "a great many miscellaneous books, _The Promised Land_, _Laddie_, _A Girl of the Limberlost_, _The Friendly Road_, and books of that kind. The first three authors are my favorites; but the Bible and Longfellow are the most comfort and enjoyment."
On the whole there are comparatively few to complain, as one did, that the Bible and a paper now and then compose their entire means of outlook into the world of literature; or as this one said: "When I was at home my only book that was my own property was the Bible." Fortunately this young girl had thus a compendium of all literature, and she is coming out all right.
It also should be a surprise that there should be so few to include a list like this: "_Prue and I_, some books on the economic status of woman, and a few books on domestic science." But perhaps Country Girls would not think to classify their interest in such studies as these under the heading "reading."
The mothers and daughters, if requested together, would no doubt mention some of the same interferences with the pleasure of reading; but the daughters give some that the mothers would never have thought to state. Work is the great interference for both. The daughters are deterred by housework, sewing, picking blue-berries, darning stockings. Weariness, the tired-out feeling, come in. There is so much work to be done in doors and out, and the barn work lasts so late; the evenings are short and when the work is finished, it is time to retire.