The Chronicles of Rhoda

by Florence Tinsley Cox

Close in a sheltered corner in our parlor there stood a bookcase. It had two glass doors, and a brass key, and rows and rows of books that looked out invitingly on the world, and seemed to say, "Come, read me." On the bottom shelf of all there were children's books,—"The Child's History of England," "Plutarch's Lives" in brown and gold, a green "Ivanhoe," a red "Alice in Wonderland," and a fat blue book, "The Child's Own Book of Fairy Tales," with rubbed corners, and loose leaves, and a crooked signature on the front page that read, painstakingly, "Rhoda Harcourt." These were my books, my dear, dear books, and with them comes a memory of hours spent in a window-seat, of dusky evenings when the firelight lit an absorbing page, and of elderly comment heard over my head.

"How she reads!" my father said, enviously. "I was just like that when I was a boy."

"The child will have no eyes," my grandmother complained.

"She must know them by heart," my mother added.

I did know them pretty thoroughly, but when I tired of old friends I had only to climb up a shelf higher to find new ones. "Japheth in Search of a Father," "The Mill on the Floss," and "Les Miserables," stood just above my head, and there were stories of children in all of these,—the most entrancing stories that opened a window into a glorious golden world of ideality and romance. It was such a wide world! People did things there. They lived and loved, and when they died the event stamped itself on my mind with a pathos that made me cry from sheer pity.

"I wish Rhoda wouldn't read so many books," my mother said. "She excites herself over them. She is so different from other children of her age!"

She said it half complainingly and half exultingly. Somehow I knew that my mother liked me to read, and that she liked me to be a little different from other children. Sometimes she bragged about it in a mild way to chance callers.

"Rhoda reads the oddest things," I heard her tell two ladies. "When I was a little girl I liked to read 'The Wide, Wide World,' but she likes novels and histories."