Page:Leah Reed--Brenda's summer at Rockley.djvu/275

Rh 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.