Explore "From Memory's Shrine" by Carmen Sylva on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
It was on my governess, Fräulein Josse, that devolved the pleasing task of bringing a little innocent amusement into our lives. She lent herself the more willingly to this, I fancy, that she was often in her inmost soul distressed to see us thus early initiated into so much sorrow and suffering, such painful daily experiences naturally robbing us of the healthy unthinking lightheartedness, befitting our age. Nor was she in the least a partisan of the uncompromisingly matter-of-fact system of education on which we were brought up. She actually read some _Mährchen_ aloud to us, and we absolutely revelled in the enchantments of that delicious fairy-world, whose gates were thus thrown open to us. This was the beginning of a quite new sort of game, in which even poor little Otto could take part, these delightful stories being acted over and over again by us, and we grew quite inventive in devising characters for him, which he could impersonate sitting in his chair, and thus have the illusion of playing his part. It was kind Fräulein Josse too, who gave me the "Wide, Wide World," the only book in the least resembling a novel which I was allowed to read while in my teens. I was so fond of it, that I used to hide it under a chair, whence I could fetch it out and devour a few pages, in the hours when I ought, perhaps, to have been committing lines of Horace or Ovid to memory, or writing an essay on some period of Church history.
The "Wide, Wide World" thus became, with "Augustin," the story I have already mentioned, the favourite reading of my childhood, and those two simple books were my inseparable companions all through my schooldays. My own pleasure in them had been so great, I would have liked to share it with others, and one of the very first things I did on arriving in Roumania, was to have "Augustin" translated into the language of my new country. Unfortunately, the translator's knowledge of Roumanian was insufficient, a circumstance of which I was then unable to judge, so my plan did not succeed.