From Memory's Shrine by Carmen Sylva — Read

This angel in human form was a grand-niece of the celebrated Swiss philosopher and physiognomist, Johann Caspar Levater. She was one of a family of ten children, the father a member of the little French-speaking Protestant community at Hanau, and the mother an Englishwoman.

When Fräulein Lavater came as governess to my mother the latter was just six years old, and she herself a mere girl of eighteen, with big brown eyes and black hair. She was, however, already remarkably well-read in the literature of several languages, and this she always declared she owed in a great measure to the circumstance that the nonsense called children's books did not exist in her childhood, she and her brothers and sisters being consequently obliged to have recourse for such amusement as they sought in reading, to the little collection of the best poets and prose-writers, of whose works their mother's library was composed. It was thus that she had read nearly all Shakespeare's plays when she was eight years old. In order to indulge their taste for reading, without always having to be guided by the choice of their elders, these young people had, she told us, discovered a most ingenious method of quietly pushing open a panel of the bookcase, making an aperture just wide enough to introduce the smallest arm among them, with which several coveted volumes would be fetched down from the shelves, and carried off to some safe hiding-place, to be brought out and devoured at leisure afterwards.