Annals of our ancestors; one hundred and fifty years of history in the ...

40
ANNALS OF OUR ANCESTORS
children learned the alphabet from the old Family Bible, and
it was their reader at school. Had the Book been excluded
from the public schools of those days, sad indeed would have
been the condition of the majority. To our mothers it was
history, biography, poetry. They read it while they spun at
the flax-wheel, while they rocked the cradle. It explained
that other Book, the Book of Nature; it made our ancestors
what they were — honest, God-fearing people. Were I to
take from our mother's life her faith in the divine inspiration
of the Holy Scriptures and ignore the influence it exerted upon
her whole way, I should be no true historian. She read it in
childhood as a school-book; in later years it was to her a treasury
of all knowledge. How she delighted to trace through its
prophetic books the coming Christ! The approaching footsteps
of the Divine thrilled her in their onward march
through the Old Testament. All the great events recorded
in her Book became so familiar that she used to spend the
long evenings when father was away from home telling us of
Daniel in the lions' den, of the Hebrew children, of David and
Goliath, and many another of those immortal stories.
Our mother developed into an active, obedient child, fond
of play and ever eager to know. I like to fancy my Grandmother
Keeler — tall, large and fine-looking as she was —
when her busy day was over, sitting down with the large
Family Bible open in her lap and her knitting-needles in her
hands. Plump William and little dark-eyed Sophronia and
then the younger ones, one by one they were called to recite
at mother's knee. First they learned the large capital letters
at the beginning of the chapters, pointed out to them by a
knitting needle; next came the small letters, and then simple
words of one and two syllables, till they could read them off at
sight. Indeed those mothers of ours knew various arts, and
withal were not poor governesses, starting their children well
on the road to knowledge. The Bible being the only textbook
of our mother's youth, coupled with her great love for
it, made her the best informed person I have yet met in all the
great facts of that greatest Book. As I write, my eye is ever
looking from the little brown-eyed girl at her mother's knee to