"Harriet is a very good girl. She has been to school all this summer,
and has learned to read very fluently. She has committed to memory
twenty-seven hymns and two long chapters in the Bible. She has a
remarkably retentive memory and will make a very good scholar."

At this time the child was five years old, and a regular attendant at
"Ma'am Kilbourne's" school on West Street, to which she walked every
day hand in hand with her chubby, rosy-faced, bare-footed, four-year-
old brother, Henry Ward. With the ability to read germinated the
intense literary longing that was to be hers through life. In those
days but few books were specially prepared for children, and at six
years of age we find the little girl hungrily searching for mental
food amid barrels of old sermons and pamphlets stored in a corner of
the garret. Here it seemed to her were some thousands of the most
unintelligible things. "An appeal on the unlawfulness of a man
marrying his wife's sister" turned up in every barrel she
investigated, by twos, or threes, or dozens, till her soul despaired
of finding an end. At last her patient search was rewarded, for at the
very bottom of a barrel of musty sermons she discovered an ancient
volume of "The Arabian Nights." With this her fortune was made, for in
these most fascinating of fairy tales the imaginative child discovered
a well-spring of joy that was all her own. When things went astray
with her, when her brothers started off on long excursions, refusing
to take her with them, or in any other childish sorrow, she had only
to curl herself up in some snug corner and sail forth on her bit of
enchanted carpet into fairyland to forget all her griefs.

In recalling her own child-life Mrs. Stowe, among other things,
describes her father's library, and gives a vivid bit of her own