Show KATHLEEN NORRIS Books Are Path to Happy Life I WAS a little my mother used to clear the decks for herself and the other women of the household on many a holiday morning by sending us all off on a This was no mere pleasure we had to take the very small brother and sister along and keep them amused until We went on the where there were a view of the and a breeze on the hottest We took sumptuous because we packed them We took extraneous matters like pencils for salt for potatoes baked in a pan for We dragged a milk tin of cold But above all we took The pervading fear seemed to be that we might run out of reading Everyone took three or Lying on the brown California with the oaks over us and the flashing shadows of buzzards and meadow larks moving with the small children murmuring beside the tiny brook and the afternoon sun going down over faraway San we Good Books We read some I although the supply of it was not what it is We also read Tennyson and both We memorized Lady of and Story of Bunker We learned Lincoln's Gettysburg address by also read Dickens Hundreds of shorter poems recited with great gesticulation remain with me to this My taste ran to the domestic and tales of large Miss Every of Miss of a household My destined one day to marry a loved poetry even at She read Idylls of the and Ring and the before she could grasp half their She compiled her own book of favorite that ranged from Shakespeare through Imogen Andrew Lang and u hundred others down to Gilbert of the She loved Emily Dickenson long before ever the world We would go home from these outings carrying bunches of yarrow or daisies tar my mother's leading small bedraggled happy children who were scented by tarwood and and sooty baked And our souls would be filled with the glory of immortal We reported our literary progress my father at and he matched our discoveries with his Fifty years after his voice was many a classic line comes back to me now in his Happy Childhood How much a happy childhood does to create a happy who My own life comes back to happiness after all its storms and stresses like a And the part that good books contributed in those young years is If only to show us what other men and in other great world have endured and felt and books are great M a cauley's Nansen and Shackelton seeking the so weak and so with his Stella and his and and the they prove to us that terrors need not be that stout courage wins against all Don't cheat yourself out of good For our children the way is blocked by They have no time for great for Steer-forth lying dead In the cruel I had often seen him lie as a at for Cleopatra's good-bye to her |