Page:The Toll of the Bush.pdf/139

It had all come about through the unpacking of the box of books and Robert’s offer to Lena to lend her any volume she cared to read. But one day Robert discovered that history became more intelligible when it was read aloud, because the movement of words was then sufficiently rapid to create pictures, an effect which was not produced in the course of the slow finger-following perusal which his want of practice necessitated. So Lena became the reader. She had a musical voice, full of delicate shades of feeling, and it flowed trippingly over proper nouns in a way that took Robert’s breath away until he became used to it. Then in that alien country the Old World scenes, as depicted by the genius of the historian, took fresh being, and they saw the wild English and Saxon hordes, the men who were not to be denied, swoop down on the sacred land, where was yet the dying clasp of the Roman. Other parts of the book they merely skimmed, picking out the battles for special attention, as children pick plums from a cake. But the history of the English till the Conquest, the stirring story of the