'Do you think you will finish this one ?' 'I may as well go on with it since I have begun it,' my mother says, so slyly that my sister and I shake our heads at each other to imply, 'Was there ever such a woman!' 'There are none of those one-legged scoundrels in my books,' I say.
'Better without them,' she replies promptly.
'I wonder, mother, what it is about the man that so infatuates the public ?' 'He takes no hold of me,' she insists.

'I would a hantle rather read your books.' I offer obligingly to bring one of them to her, and now she looks at me suspiciously.

'You surely believe I like yours best,' she says with instant anxiety, and I soothe her by assurances, and retire advising her to read on, just to see if she can find out how he misleads the public.
'Oh, I may take a look at it again by-and-by,' she says indifferently, but nevertheless the probability is that as the door shuts the book opens, as if by some mechanical contrivance.

I remember how she read 'Treasure Island,' holding it close to the ribs of the fire (because she could not spare a moment to rise and light the gas), and how, when bed-time came, and we coaxed, remonstrated, scolded, she said quite fiercely, clinging to the book, 'I dinna lay my head on a pillow this night till I see how that laddie got out of the barrel.' After this, I think, he was as bewitching as the laddie in the barrel to her--Was he not always a laddie in the barrel himself, climbing in for apples while we all stood around, like gamins, waiting for a bite?
He was the spirit of boyhood tugging at the skirts of this old world of ours and compelling it to come back and play.

And I suppose my mother felt this, as so many have felt it: like others she was a little scared at first to find herself skipping again, with this masterful child at the rope, but soon she gave him her hand and set off with him for the meadow, not an apology between the two of them for the author left behind.