"[...] At seven, with a remarkably retentive memory, --a thing which many of us spoil by trashy reading, or allowing our time and attention to be distracted by the trifles of every-day life, --Harriet had learned twenty-seven hymns and two long chapters of the Bible. She was exceedingly fond of reading, but there was little in a poor minister's library to attract a child. She found Bell's Sermons, and Toplady on Predestination. "Then," she says, "there was a side closet full of documents, a weltering ocean of pamphlets, in ...
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"[...] At seven, with a remarkably retentive memory, --a thing which many of us spoil by trashy reading, or allowing our time and attention to be distracted by the trifles of every-day life, --Harriet had learned twenty-seven hymns and two long chapters of the Bible. She was exceedingly fond of reading, but there was little in a poor minister's library to attract a child. She found Bell's Sermons, and Toplady on Predestination. "Then," she says, "there was a side closet full of documents, a weltering ocean of pamphlets, in which I dug and toiled for hours, to be repaid by disinterring a delicious morsel of a Don Quixote, that had once been a book, but was now lying in forty or fifty dissecta membra, amid Calls, Appeals, Essays, [...]
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