As for the education of the children, there was of course much of it that represented downright hard work and drudgery.  There was also much training that came as a by-product and was perhaps almost as valuable—­not as a substitute but as an addition.  After their supper, the children, when little, would come trotting up to their mother’s room to be read to, and it was always a surprise to me to notice the extremely varied reading which interested them, from Howard Pyle’s “Robin Hood,” Mary Alicia Owen’s “Voodoo Tales,” and Joel Chandler Harris’s “Aaron in the Wild Woods,” to “Lycides” and “King John.”  If their mother was absent, I would try to act as vice-mother—­a poor substitute, I fear—­superintending the supper and reading aloud afterwards.  The children did not wish me to read the books they desired their mother to read, and I usually took some such book as “Hereward the Wake,” or “Guy Mannering,” or “The Last of the Mohicans” or else some story about a man-eating tiger, or a man-eating lion, from one of the hunting books in my library.  These latter stories were always favorites, and as the authors told them in the first person, my interested auditors grew to know them by the name of the “I” stories, and regarded them as adventures all of which happened to the same individual.  When Selous, the African hunter, visited us, I had to get him to tell to the younger children two or three of the stories with which they were already familiar from my reading; and as Selous is a most graphic narrator, and always enters thoroughly into the feeling not only of himself but of the opposing lion or buffalo, my own rendering of the incidents was cast entirely into the shade.

Besides profiting by the more canonical books on education, we profited by certain essays and articles of a less orthodox type.  I wish to express my warmest gratitude for such books—­not of avowedly didactic purpose—­as Laura Richards’s books, Josephine Dodge Daskam’s “Madness of Philip,” Palmer Cox’s “Queer People,” the melodies of Father Goose and Mother Wild Goose, Flandreau’s “Mrs. White’s,” Myra Kelly’s stories of her little East Side pupils, and Michelson’s “Madigans.”  It is well to take duties, and life generally, seriously.  It is also well to remember that a sense of humor is a healthy anti-scorbutic to that portentous seriousness which defeats its own purpose.

Occasionally bits of self-education proved of unexpected help to the children in later years.  Like other children, they were apt to take to bed with them treasures which they particularly esteemed.  One of the boys, just before his sixteenth birthday, went moose hunting with the family doctor, and close personal friend of the entire family, Alexander Lambert.  Once night overtook them before they camped, and they had to lie down just where they were.  Next morning Dr. Lambert rather enviously congratulated the boy on the fact that stones and roots evidently did not interfere with the soundness of his sleep; to which the boy responded, “Well, Doctor, you see it isn’t very long since I used to take fourteen china animals to bed with me every night!”