make a chart of contemporary history and another of literature, taking one century a month, and leaving plenty of space for adding things afterwards.  In Literature, I should take one of the Men of Letters every month, or one of the Foreign Classics, and at the same time read any of the man’s own works that I could.  Modern poets and novelists and essayists I should read at odd times, specially making it a matter of conscience never to open a novel before luncheon!  I should read my poets not only promiscuously, as the fancy took me, but compare their treatment of different subjects; e.g., you might make yourself a private New Year’s Eve service, of all the poems on it you can find—­Coleridge, Tennyson, and Elia’s prose poem on the same subject.  Or you could make a Shepherd’s Calendar for yourself, and copy out under each month what poets have said about it, and its flowers and features generally:  or a Poet’s Garden; collect all the bits about flowers, and make a ‘Poet’s Corner’ in your garden, admitting no flower that cannot bring some poetry as its credential.  It will make country life far more enjoyable if you know your poets as Thomas Holbrook, in ‘Cranford,’ knew Tennyson.”

“I should like all that, Aunt Rachel; but you have not said anything that sounds like stiff reading yet.”

“No; and you ought to have something that will tax all your powers, as well as this general cultivation, which will be all pleasant.  I should take some really stiff book, on Logic or Political Economy, or Butler’s ‘Analogy,’ and after each morning’s work make a careful analysis of the argument, leaving one side of your MS. book blank, that you may put in afterwards any illustrations or criticisms of your own, or others, that may occur to you in the future.  I should always keep a stiff book in hand and treat it so, even if all other regularity and plan in my reading fell through—­it would be a backbone.”

“But I shall have so much writing to do if I am to make a commonplace book on each subject.”

“It will make you slower, but much surer.  I know a girl who writes a review of every book she reads, giving extracts, and an abstract of the argument and her own opinion of it.  She finds it most useful, both as practice in expressing her thoughts and for reference afterwards.”

“But it would take so long.”

“You would be well repaid, and you would not read any books in your time for study which were not worth taking trouble with.  In reading a book, I should put a mark to everything that struck me, and at the end of a chapter should look over the marked bits, and put a second mark to those parts that seemed specially important, after I had mastered the drift of the chapter.  It would then be easy, when you had finished the book, to write a review, for you would only look at the doubly marked bits.”

“And am I to do no science?”

“I should vary your science with your opportunities, because you have no strong turn for any one in particular.  When you go to town in the winter for that long visit you should get some cooking lessons, and before you go you should get the books recommended by the South Kensington Cookery School, and study the bookwork on the subject.  When you go away in the summer, you should take up geology, or botany, or whatever suits the place you go to.”