Yet there were times when she grudged him to them--as the day when he returned victorious.

Then what was before her eyes was not the son coming marching home again but an old woman peering for him round the window curtain and trying not to look uplifted.
The newspaper reports would be about the son, but my mother's comment was 'She's a proud woman this night.' We read many books together when I was a boy, 'Robinson Crusoe' being the first (and the second), and the 'Arabian Nights' should have been the next, for we got it out of the library (a penny for three days), but on discovering that they were nights when we had paid for knights we sent that volume packing, and I have curled my lips at it ever since.

'The Pilgrim's Progress' we had in the house (it was as common a possession as a dresser-head), and so enamoured of it was I that I turned our garden into sloughs of Despond, with pea-sticks to represent Christian on his travels and a buffet-stool for his burden, but when I dragged my mother out to see my handiwork she was scared, and I felt for days, with a certain elation, that I had been a dark character.

Besides reading every book we could hire or borrow I also bought one now and again, and while buying (it was the occupation of weeks) I read, standing at the counter, most of the other books in the shop, which is perhaps the most exquisite way of reading.

And I took in a magazine called 'Sunshine,' the most delicious periodical, I am sure, of any day.