"Are you hiding from Aunt Martha, Ellen?" I asked teasingly.
"I slipped away while she was helping your mother set table," she answered, "and stole up here to read. I don't often get a chance; your Aunt Martha keeps me at work from sun up till dark, and then sends me to bed. She says it is a wicked waste of time to read anything but one's Bible--and the holy father in Baltimore told me that the way Protestants presumed to read the sacred book, and determine for themselves its sacred meaning is blasphemous."
"One of the Shakespeare books my father gave me. I have six more like it," and she held up to my view a small leather bound volume, a good deal the worse for wear. "I slipped it into my satchel when Aunt Martha sent me up stairs to get my things, the morning you came for us, but please don't tell her, Cousin Donald--she said she'd take the books away from me if she saw me reading them again, for they were not fit reading for me, and I had no time to waste on them."
"How did she know they were not fit reading for you?" I asked, curious to learn if Aunt Martha had stopped work long enough to examine a book.
"She made Uncle Thomas read some out of one of the volumes to her," answered Ellen, smiling in response to my thought. "And she said, at breakfast table next morning, that a great deal of it had neither sense nor meaning, and the part she could understand was about fighting and killing, or else foolish love stuff--all of it unfit for any young person to hear. She wanted to burn my books, as she did my crucifix, but I ran and hid them, and cried so, all day, that Uncle Thomas said 'Let the child's books alone, Martha; her father gave them to her; if they harm her it's no fault of yours.'"
"Is the reading as good as your telling of the stories, Ellen?"
"Oh, so much nicer. There are beautiful things I could never say; listen," and she read me a passage from "Romeo and Juliet." "Isn't that like music? The very words have a tune to them without thinking of the meaning even."
"Could you lend me the book to read while you are here, Ellen? or to-morrow, if you will, we'll come up here and you shall read aloud to me."
"But your mother and father might find out, and tell Aunt Martha."