Page:Mrs Elwood 1843.pdf/6

308 enabled her, like all other imaginative children, to create for herself a fairy land of her own, in which she would find consolation for her sorrows and troubles, whether real or imaginary. She read with avidity every thing which came in her way, giving the preference, very naturally, to romance and poetry; and though the prudent and thoughtful cousin, who undertook the care of her education whilst at Trevor Park, "always made it her particular care never to allow of her reading novels, knowing it would only weaken her mind, and give it a distaste to more serious reading," yet, despite the prohibition, Cooke's novelists and poets were all read through, even in the early days of childhood.

The reading of a new book appears to have been an epoch in her existence, and indeed of Robinson Crusoe, as she observes, the first perusal thereof is an epoch in every child's life. She says of herself, "For weeks after reading that book, I lived as if in a dream; indeed I scarcely dreamt of anything else at night. I went to sleep with the cave, its parrots and goats, floating before my closed eyes. I awakened in some rapid flight from the savages landing in their canoes. The elms in our hedges were not more familiar than the prickly shrubs which formed his palisades, and the grapes whose drooping branches made fertile the wide savannahs."

Of the "Arabian Nights," she states, "the world thereof for a time became hers;" her little lonely island, dark with the mingled shade of the yew and the willow, whilst perusing them, was deserted for a gayer retreat, and she found a summer palace amid the beautiful boughs of a large acacia, where amid the odours of sweet smelling flowers, and the murmuring hum of