Chambers's Graduated Readers Volume 5 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1894 Excerpt: ...for himself. 2. For this his best friends called him a fool; and I, without expressing any opinion as to his wisdom, which I knew in such matters to be at least equal to mine, have written on the granite slab over his grave that he was an ' entirely honest merchant.' 3. Years went on, and I came to be four or five years old. He could command a post-chaise and pair for two months in the summer, by help of which, with my mother and me, he went the round of his country customers. At a jog-trot pace, and through the panoramic opening of the four windows of a post-chaise, I saw all the high-roads, and most of the cross ones, of England and Wales, and a great part of lowland Scotland as far as Perth. 4. It happened also, which was the real cause of the bias of my after-life, that my father had a rare love of pictures. Accordingly, wherever there was a gallery to be seen, we stopped at the nearest town for the night, and in reverentest manner I thus saw nearly all the noblemen's houses in England; not, indeed, myself at that age caring for pictures, but much for castles and ruins; feeling, more and more as I grew older, the healthy delight of uncovetous admiration, and perceiving that it was probably much happier to live in a small house and have Warwick Castle to be astonished at, than to live in Warwick Castle and have nothing to be astonished at. 5. My mother's general principles of first treatment were to guard me with steady watchfulness from all avoidable pain or danger; and for the rest, to let me amuse myself as I liked, provided I was neither fretful nor troublesome. No toys of any kind were at first allowed. 6. I was never permitted for an instant to hope, or even imagine, the possession of such things as one saw in toy-shops. I had a bunch of keys to pl...