If you have at your command three hours per diem, you may study art, literature, and philosophy, not as they are studied professionally, but in the degree involved in general culture. If you have but one hour every day, read philosophy, or learn foreign languages, living or dead. If you can command only fifteen or twenty minutes, read the Bible with the best commentaries, and daily a verse or two of the best poetry.In the days when Julia was going round the corner to Mrs. Smith's school, Sam was newly returned from a long course of study and travel abroad, while Henry and Marion were at Round Hill School under the care of Dr. Joseph Greene Cogswell and Mr. George Bancroft. The former was a beloved friend of the Ward family, and often visited them. We have pleasant glimpses of the household at this time, when the lines of paternal guidance, though still firmly, were somewhat less rigidly drawn. Breakfast at “The corer” was at eight in winter, and at half past 7 in summer, Mr. Ward reading
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was on no account to be set free before the appointed hour.
This was characteristic of her through life.
The chain of habit once formed was never broken, and study was meat and drink to her. Her “precious time” (which we children saucily abbreviated to “P. T.” ) was as real a thing to us as sunrise: we were not to break in upon it for anything short of a fire — or a cut finger!
Many years later, she laid down for the benefit of the younger generation these rules:--
Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston and New York. 1916.
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