Give them work to do and good novels to read and they will get over it.
History breeds queer ideas in children. They read of military heroes,
kings and statesmen who commit awful deeds and are yet monuments of
public honor. What a sweet hero is Raleigh, who was a farmer of piracy;
what a grand Admiral was Drake; what demi-gods the fighting Americans
who murdered Indians for the crime of wanting their own! History hath
charms to move an infant breast to savagery. Good strong novels are the
best pabulum to nourish difference between virtue and vice.

Don't I know? I have felt the miracle and learned the difference so well
that even now at an advanced age I can tell the difference and indulge
in either. It was not a week after the killing of Joquita that I read
the first novel of my life. It was "Scottish Chiefs." The dead bodies of
ten thousand novels lie between me and that first one. I have not read
it since. Ten Incas of Peru with ten rooms full of solid gold could
not tempt me to read it again. Have I not a clear cinch on a delicious
memory, compared with which gold is only Robinson Crusoe's "drug?" After
a lapse of all these years the content of that one tremendous, noble
chapter of heroic climax is as deeply burned into my memory as if it had
been read yesterday.

A sister, old enough to receive "beaux" and addicted to the piano-forte
accomplishment, was at that time practicing across the hall an
instrumental composition, entitled, "La Reve." Under the title, printed
in very small letters, was the English translation; but I never thought
to look at it. An elocutionist had shortly before recited Poe's Raven at
a church entertainment, and that gloomy bird flapped its wings in my
young emotional vicinity when the firelight threw vague "shadows on the
floor." When the piece of music was spoken as "La Reve," its sad
cadences, suffering, of course, under practice, were instantly wedded in