Page:Leah Reed--Brenda's summer at Rockley.djvu/221

Rh Brent,” which contained enough romance to satisfy even the exacting Brenda. One afternoon Amy had read some of her favorite passages from “The Faery Queen.” But it  is no breach of confidence, perhaps, to say that Brenda felt  just a little bored, and not altogether pleased with the  musical lines. “I can’t pretend that I am able to appreciate all this poetry. It must be fine, or sensible people like you would n’t think so. Sometime I’m going to cultivate a taste for it, I really am; so don’t look as if I were the most imbecile person in the world. Many people don’t like poetry any better than I do,” she concluded. “But ‘Cranford,’—I ’ve begun ‘Cranford’ and I think that it  is just too funny for anything. I never read anything half so funny. I wish that we could have something else like that.”

Now in so short a time the four friends could not have read so many books, had they tried to do all their work in  the hours of their meeting. So they established their reading club on a rather novel plan. On the recommendation of Mrs. Barlow and Mrs. Redmond, they were making out  a list of entertaining and wholesome books with which it  was desirable that they should be acquainted. Each girl was to report once a week that she had read two of these  books, and at each of their meetings, each girl in turn was  to have the privilege of choosing the book from which she  wished to have a chapter or two read.

Now, even girls who are not book-worms will read in the summer. What else is there to do in the long hours of the middle of the day, when it is too hot to wheel or walk, or