Once a day, at whatever hour the poor, overworked mistress could find time, a class would be called out to toe the chalked semicircle on the floor for a reading lesson. This lesson, which should have been pleasant, for the reading matter was good, was tedious in the extreme. Many of the children read so slowly and haltingly that Laura, who was impatient by nature, longed to take hold of their words and drag them out of their mouths, and it often seemed to her that her own turn to read would never come. As often as she could do so without being detected, she would turn over and peep between the pages of her own Royal Reader, and, studiously holding the book to her nose, pretend to be following the lesson while she was pages ahead.

There was plenty there to enthral any child: “The Skater Chased by Wolves;” “The Siege of Torquilstone,” from Ivanhoe; Fenimore Cooper’s Prairie on Fire; and Washington Irving’s Capture of Wild Horses.

Then there were fascinating descriptions of such far-apart places as Greenland and the Amazon; of the Pacific Ocean with its fairy islands and coral reefs; the snows of Hudson Bay Territory and the sterile heights of the Andes. Best of all she loved the description of the Himalayas, which began: “Northward of the great plain of India, and along its whole extent, towers the sublime mountain region of the Himalayas, ascending gradually until it terminates in a long range of summits wrapped in perpetual snow.”

Interspersed between the prose readings were poems: “The Slave’s Dream;” “Young Lochinvar;” “The Parting of Douglas and Marmion;” Tennyson’s “Brook” and “Ring out, Wild Bells;” Byron’s “Shipwreck;” Hogg’s “Skylark,” and many more. “Lochiel’s Warning” was a favourite with Edmund, who often, in bed at night, might be heard declaiming: “Lochiel! Lochiel! beware of the day!” while Laura, at any time, with or without encouragement, was ready to “look back into other years” with Henry Glassford Bell, and recite his scenes from the life of Mary Queen of Scots, reserving her most impressive tone for the concluding couplet:

Lapped by a dog. Go think of it in silence and alone,

Then weigh against a grain of sand the glories of a throne.

But long before their schooldays were over they knew every piece in the books by heart and it was one of their greatest pleasures in life to recite them to each other. By that time Edmund had appropriated Scott and could repeat hundreds of lines, always showing a preference for scenes of single combat between warrior chiefs. The selection in the Royal Readers, then, was an education in itself for those who took to it kindly; but the majority of the children would have none of it; saying that the prose was “dry old stuff” and that they hated “portry.”