Where families were too poor to buy story-books, the children found what
amusement they could in the parents' small library. In ministers'
families sermons were more plentiful than books. Mrs. H.B. Stowe, when a
girl, found barrels of sermons in the garret of her father, the Rev. Dr.
Beecher, in Litchfield, Connecticut. Through these sermons his daughter
searched hungrily for mental food. It seemed as if there were thousands
of the most unintelligible things. "An appeal on the unlawfulness of a
man's marrying his wife's sister" turned up in every barrel by the
dozens, until she despaired of finding an end of it. At last an ancient
volume of "Arabian Nights" was unearthed. Here was the one inexhaustible
source of delight to a child so eager for books that at ten years of age
she had pored over the two volumes of the "Magnalia."
The library advantages of a more fortunately placed old-fashioned child
we know from Dr. Holmes's frequent reference to incidents of his
boyhood. He frankly confessed that he read in and not through many of
the two thousand books in his father's library; but he found much to
interest him in the volumes of periodicals, especially in the "Annual
Register" and Rees's "Encyclopedia.
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