nephews. A country farmer has not much money to spare, and Julia, when she found that Eliza’s namesake, the eldest of the family, was anxious to study music, was only too glad to pay for a six months’ course of lessons in advance. The girl already could play a few hymn-tunes on the cabinet organ, which was the most pretentious piece of furniture in the little parlor, and she had confided to Julia that when she could perform the longer pieces in the book of instruction she should be perfectly happy. A large tool-chest, filled with an assortment of mysterious implements, found its way to the farm-house during Julia’s stay there, and the boys and their father were equally pleased with it. Another box—a large one, this time—brought a collection of standard books. Julia had discovered that a great need of the little community was good books, and she had in mind the elder Eliza and her brother, and some of the heads of families in the neighborhood, when she ordered from town Sir John Lubbock’s “Hundred Best Books,” in the uniform and inexpensive binding into which a certain publisher had put them.
“Some of them,” she said to herself, “will certainly be above the heads of most of the people here. But it’s better for them to have books that they will have to climb up to, rather than books they must grovel over, like some of the novels they read.”
In the village, Julia found one or two helpless old people supported half by charity and by the grudging help of distant relatives.
