Mrs. Fred Maturin
Published: 2018-02
Total Pages: 432
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Excerpt from Adventures Beyond the Zambesi: Of the O'flaherty, the Insular Miss. The Soldier Man; And the Rebel-Woman To see the world, to seek adventures, has appealed to me all my life. As a child I was almost obsessed by the idea. I devoured childish books of travel and adventure, and they were the only sort that appealed to me. Other little girls seemed content with the especial kind of literature designed and written for little girls at that period, works like Queechy, Daisy at Home, Heir of Redcliffe, and The Wide, Wide World. My contemporaries will be aware that in these the childish heroine is almost too good to live, and the feeling I got when I was made to peruse these volumes was that I really must be a kind of youthful female monstrosity, for I wanted to do none of the things that the young heroines of these tales did, and I loathed the mere idea of leading the goody-goody lives they led. Nowadays I notice that girls are allowed to be tom-boys if such is their bent. There is nothing shocking in it, no reproach at all. Quite the contrary. But in the days of my childhood, if you were unhappy enough to be born a female, your soul was not supposed to soar above such joys as keeping a dickey-bird in a cage and feeding it with sugar and groundsel, and making woolwork slippers for your male relatives, and kettle-holders for the females, domestically inscribed Tea is ready. If you wanted to stretch your limbs, climb trees, or make a noise out of the very j oy of your youth and health, you were regarded as something entirely beyond the pale. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.