"
But our fathers were stalwart men, with many foes to encounter.
If anybody ever needed a grown-up religion, they surely did; and
it became them well.
Most of our every-day reading also came to us over the sea. Miss
Edgworth's juvenile stories were in general circulation, and we
knew "Harry and Lucy" and "Rosamond" almost as well as we did our
own playmates. But we did not think those English children had so
good a time as we did; they had to be so prim and methodical. It
seemed to us that the little folks across the water never were
allowed to romp and run wild; some of us may have held a vague
idea that this freedom of ours was the natural inheritance of
republican children only.
Primroses and cowslips and daisies bloomed in these pleasant
story-books of ours, and we went a-Maying there, with our
transatlantic playmates. I think we sometimes started off with
our baskets, expecting to find those English flowers in our own
fields. How should children be wiser than to look for every
beautiful thing they have heard of, on home ground?
And, indeed, our commonest field-flowers were, many of them,
importations from the mother-country--clover, and dandelions, and
ox-eye daisies.
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