Read it through once

In return Mrs. Mitford retailed all the gossip and news of Reading, giving the eager child the fullest accounts of the dinners and suppers and card-parties which formed a regular interchange of courtesies between neighbours in that town a century ago. These accounts, only intended by the fond mother, as we may properly suppose, to bridge the distance between school and home, were carefully stored away in the wonderful memory of their recipient, there to rest until, many years after, they were revivified and placed on record for all time—as we hope—in the pages of _Belford Regis_, the work which, quite apart from _Our Village_, has endeared its writer to all ardent Reading lovers in that it affords them a true and living picture of the ancient borough as it was in the opening years of the nineteenth century.