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Show KATHLEEN NORRIS Books Are Path to Happy Life supper, and he matched our discoveries dis-coveries with his own. Fifty years after his voice was silenced, many a classic line comes back to me now in his accents. Happy Childhood How much a happy childhood does to create a happy life, who knows? My own life comes back to happiness after all its storms and stresses like a gyroscope. And the part that good books contributed con-tributed in those young years is incalculable. If only to show us what other men and women, in other great world crises, have endured and felt and cured, books are great teachers. M a cauley's England, Nansen and Shackelton seeking the poles. Swift, so weak and so witty, with his Stella and his Vanessa, Pepys, Evelyn, Patmore and Thompson, and the moderns, Bolitho, Strachey how they prove to us that terrors need not be realized, real-ized, that stout courage wins against all odds! Don't cheat yourself out of good reading. For our children the way is blocked by movies, radio, comics, television. They have no time for great words, for Steer-forth Steer-forth lying dead in the cruel tide, "as I had often seen him lie as a boy, at school," for Cleopatra's good-bye to her handmaidens. WHEN I WAS a little girl, my mother used to clear the decks for herself and the other women of the household on many a holiday holi-day morning by sending us all off on a picnic. This was no mere pleasure expedition, we had to take the very small brother and sister along and keep them amused until afternoon. We went "up on the hill," where there were oaks, a view of the Pacific, and a breeze on the hottest hot-test day. We took sumptuous meals, because we packed them ourselves. We took extraneous matters like knives, string, pencils for games, salt for potatoes baked in ashes, a pan for bacon. We dragged a milk tin of cold water. But above all we took books. The pervading fear seemed to be that we might run out of reading matter. Everyone took three or four. Lying on the brown California Cali-fornia hillside, with the oaks over us and the flashing shadows of buzzards and meadow larks moving mov-ing overhead, with the small children chil-dren murmuring beside the tiny brook and the afternoon sun going down over faraway San Francisco, we read. Good Books We read some rubbish, I suppose, sup-pose, although the supply of it was not what it is today. We also read Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson and both Kingsleys. We memorized poems: "The Lady of Shalott," 'Sohrab and Rustum," "Pros-pice," "Pros-pice," "Grandmother's Story of Bunker Hill." We learned Lincoln's Lin-coln's Gettysburg address by 1 ". . . also read Dickens . . heart. Hundreds of shorter poems recited with great gesticulation then, remain with me to this day. My taste ran to the domestic and tales of large families; Miss Yonge, Miss Carey, Mrs. Moles-worth. Moles-worth. Every character of Miss Alcott's was, of course, a household house-hold word. My sister, destined one day to marry a poet, loved poetry even at ten. She read "The Idylls of the King," "Marmion," and "The Ring and the Book" before she could grasp half their meaning. She compiled her own book of favorite fa-vorite poems, that ranged from Shakespeare through Rosetti, Imogen Imo-gen Guiney, Lisetta Reese, Andrew An-drew Lang and a hundred others down to Gilbert of the "Bab Ballads." Bal-lads." She loved Emily Dickenson Dicken-son long before ever the world did. We would go home from these outings weary, carrying bunches of yarrow or Michaelmas daisies for my mother's vases, leading small bedraggled happy children who were scented by tarwood and sunshine, oakleaves and sooty baked potatoes. And our souls would be filled with the glory of immortal words. We reported our literary progress to my father at |
