The boy who was first down in the morning had an apple given to him. This apple was greatly despised by the bolder spirits, who taunted those who arose promptly with a desire to obtain it.

Candour compels me to admit that, as a teacher of learning, Mr. Greene was not pre-eminent. He had two schoolrooms, and employed for each as good a teacher as he could hire. But we were not at all thoroughly well taught, although we were kept longer in the schoolroom than was really good for us; for in summer we had an hour's study before breakfast, then from nine till twelve, and again from two to five. In winter we had, instead of the early lesson, an hour in the evening. Something was wanting in the system, and I believe that after a year and a half I knew no more, as regards studies, than I did when I first entered.

When a boy's birthday came, he was allowed to have some special dainty for us all. I was very much disgusted with the Boston boys when they selected pork and beans, which I loathed. Some would choose plum-pudding, others apple-pies. There were always two or three dishes for breakfast, as, for instance, fried potatoes and b.u.t.ter, or cold meat, or pan-dowdy--a kind of coa.r.s.e and broken up apple-pie--with the tea and bread and coffee, but we could only eat of one. There was rather too much petty infant-schoolery in all this, but we got on very well. Pepper and mustard were forbidden, but I always had a great natural craving for these, and when I asked for them, Mr. Greene would shake his head, but always ended by handing them to me. He was a _bon vivant_ himself, and sympathised with me. There were one or two books also of a rather peppery or spicy nature in his library, such as a collection of rollicking London songs, at which he likewise shook his head when I asked for them--but I got them. There I read for the first time all of Walter Scott's novels, and the Percy Ballads, and some of Marryatt's romances, and Hood's Annual, and Dr. Holmes's first poems.

There was in Mr. Greene's library a very curious and now rare work in three volumes, published in Boston at some time in the twenties, called "The Marvellous Depository." It consisted of old legends of Boston, such as the story of "Peter Rugg," "Tom Walker and the Devil," "The Golden Tooth," "Captain Kidd," "The Witch Flymaker," and an admirable collection of unearthly German tales, such as "The Devil's Elixir," by Hoffmann (abridged), "Jacob the Bowl," "Rubezahl," "Der Freyschutz," and many more, but all of the unearthly blood-curdling kind. Singly, they were appalling enough to any one in those days when the supernatural still thrilled the strongest minds, but taken altogether for steady reading, the book was a perfect Sabbat of deviltry and dramatic horrors. The tales were well told, or translated in very simple but vigorous English, and I pored over the collection and got it by heart, and borrowed it, and took it to Dedham in the holidays, and into the woods, where I read it in sunshine or twilight shade by the rippling river, under wild rocks, and so steeped my soul in the supernatural, that I seemed to live a double life. As was natural, my schoolmates read and liked such tales, but they sunk into my very soul, and took root, and grew up into a great overshadowing forest, while with others they were only as dwarf bushes, if they grew at all. All of this--though I did not know it--was unconsciously educating my bewitched mind to a deep and very precocious pa.s.sion for mediaeval and black-letter literature and occult philosophy, which was destined to manifest itself within a few years.

There was another book which greatly influenced my mind and life. I have forgotten the t.i.tle, but it was a very remarkable collection of curiosities, such as accounts of a family of seven children who had every one some strange peculiarity, dwarfs and giants, and mysteriously-gifted mortals, and all kinds of odd beings and inventions. I obtained in a very mysterious way; for one day I found it in my desk, a blessed gift indeed from some unknown friend who had rightly judged of my tastes. This work I literally lived upon for a long time. Once a lady friend of my mother's came in winter and took me a-sleighing, but I had my dear book under my jacket, and contrived now and then to re-read some anecdote in it. In after years I found a copy of it in the Mercantile Library, Philadelphia, but I have never seen it elsewhere. {56} I had at Mr.

Alcott's carefully studied all the Percy Anecdotes, and could repeat most of them when recalled by some a.s.sociation; also Goldsmith's "Animated Nature," the perusal of which latter work was to me as the waving of a forest and the sighing of deep waters. Then, too, I had read--in fact I owned--the famous Peter Parley books, which gave me, as they have to thousands of boys, a desire to travel and see the world. I marvelled greatly at finding that Peter Parley himself, or Mr. S. G. Goodrich, had a beautiful country-house very near our school, and his son Frank, who was a very pleasant and wonderfully polite and sunshiny boy, sat by me in school. Frank Goodrich in after life wrote a novel ent.i.tled "Flirtation and its Consequences," of which my brother said, "What are its consequences, Frank; good rich husbands? By no means." I can remember being invited to a perfectly heavenly garden-party at the Goodrichs', and evening visits there with my mother. And I may note by the way, that Frank himself lived abroad in after years; that his father became the American Consul in Paris, and that in 1848 he introduced to the _Gouvernement Provisoire_ the American delegation, of which I was one, and how we were caricatured in the _Charivari_, in which caricature I was specially depicted, the likeness being at once recognised by everybody, and how I knew nothing of it all till I was told about it by the beautiful Miss Goodrich, Frank's younger sister, on a Staten Island steamboat, many, many years after. And as a postscript I may add, that it is literally true that before I was quite twenty-three years of age I had been twice caricatured or pictorially jested on in the Munich _Fliegende Blatter_ and twice in the Paris _Charivari_, which may show that I was to a certain degree about town in those days, as I indeed was.

While I am about it, I may as well tell the Munich tale. There was a pretty governess, a great friend of mine, who had charge of two children.

Meeting her one day in the park, at a sign from me she pressed the children's hats down over their eyes with "Kinder, setzt eure Hute fester auf!" and in that blessed instant cast up her beautiful lips and was kissed. I don't know whether we were overseen; certain it is that in the next number of the _Fliegende Blatter_ the scene was well depicted, with the words. The other instance was this. One evening I met in a _Bierhalle_ a sergeant of police with whom I fraternised. I remember that he could talk modern Greek, having learned it in Greece. This was very _infra dig._ indeed for a student, and one of my comrades said to me that, as I was a foreigner, I was probably not aware of what a fault I had committed, but that in future I must not be seen talking to a soldier. To which I, with a terrible wink, replied, "Mum's the word; that soldier is _lieutenant of police in my ward_, and I have squared it with him all right, so that if there should be a _Bierkrawall_ (a drunken row) in our quarter he will let me go." This, which appeared as a grand flight of genial genius to a German, speedily went through all the students' _kneipe_, and soon appeared, very well ill.u.s.trated, in the "_F.

B_."

We were allowed sixpence a week spending-money at Mr. Greene's, two cents, or a penny, being deducted for a bad mark. Sometimes I actually got a full week's income; once I let it run on up to 25 cents, but this was forbidden, it not being considered advisable that the boys should acc.u.mulate fortunes. A great deal of my money went for cheap comic literature, which I carefully preserved. In those days there were Crockett's almanacs (now a great fund of folk-lore), and negro songs and stories were beginning to be popular. It is very commonly a.s.serted that the first regular negro minstrel troupe appeared in 1842. This is quite an error. While I was at Mr. Greene's, in 1835, there came to Dedham a circus with as regularly-appointed a negro minstrel troupe of a dozen as I ever saw. I often beheld the pictures of them on the bill. Nor do I think that this was any novelty even then. The Crockett almanacs greatly stimulated my sense of American humour (they do indeed form collectively a very characteristic work), and this, with some similar reading, awoke in me a pa.s.sion for wild Western life and frontier experiences, which was fully and strangely gratified in after years, but which would certainly have never happened had it not been for this boyish reading.

For I beg the reader to observe that it is a very deeply-seated characteristic that whatever once takes root in my mind invariably grows.

This comes from the great degree to which I have always gone over, reviewed, and _reflected on_, or nursed everything which ever once really interested me. And as I have thus far written, and shall probably conclude this work without referring to a note, the reader will have ample opportunity of observing how very strangely in all cases the phases of my life were predetermined long before by the literary education which I gave myself, aided very much by hereditary or other causes quite beyond my control. Now, as the object of a _Life_ is to understand every cause which created it, and as mine was to a very unusual degree created by reading and _reflecting_, even in infancy, I beg the reader not to be impatient with me for describing so much in detail the books which made my mind at different times. That is, I pray this much allowance and sympathy from possible readers and critics, that they will kindly not regard me as vain or thinking over-much of, or too much over, myself. For to get oneself forth as one really is requires deep investigation into _every_ cause, and the depicting all early characteristics, and the man never lived who ever did this truly and accurately without much egoism, or what the ill-disposed may treat as such. And I promise the possible reader that when this subjective a.n.a.lysis shall be fairly disposed of, there will be no lack of mere incident or event of objective nature and more general interest.

My first winter at Jamaica Plains was the terrible one of 1835, during which I myself saw the thermometer at 50 degrees Fahrenheit below zero, and there was a snow-bank in the play-ground from October till May. The greatest care possible was taken of us boys to keep us warm and well, but we still suffered very much from chilblains. Water thrown into the air froze while falling. Still there were some happy lights and few shadows in it all. The boys skated or slid on beautiful Jamaica Pond, which was near the school. There was a general giving of sleds to us all; mine broke to pieces at once. I never had luck with any plaything, never played ball or marbles, and hardly ever had even a top. Nor did I ever have much to do with any games, or even learn in later years to play cards, which was all a great pity. Sports should be as carefully looked to in early education as book-learning. I had also a pair of dear gazelle-skates given to me with the rest, but they also broke up on first trial, and I have never owned any since. Destiny was always against me in such matters.

The boys built two large snow-houses, roofed in or arched over with hard snow. One was ingeniously and appropriately like an Eskimo hut, with a rather long winding pa.s.sage leading into it. Of these I wrote in the spring, when the sun had begun to act, "one is almost annihilated, and of the other not a _vestage_ remains." I found the letter by chance many years later.

There lived in Boston some friends of my mother's named Gay. In the family was an old lady over eighty, who was a wonderfully lively spirited person. She still sang, as I thought, very beautifully, to the lute, old songs such as "The merry days of good Queen Bess," and remembered the old Colonial time as if it were of yesterday. One day Mr. Gay came out and took me to his house, where I remained from Sat.u.r.day until Monday; during which time I found among the books, and very nearly read through, all the poems of Peter Pindar or Doctor Wolcott. Precious reading it was for a boy of eleven, yet I enjoyed it immensely. While there, I found in the earth in the garden an oval, dark-green porphyry pebble, which I, moved by a strange feeling, preserved for many years as an amulet. It is very curious that exactly such pebbles are found as fetishes all over the world, and the famous conjuring stone of the Voodoos, which I possess, is only an ordinary black flint pebble of the same shape. Negroes have travelled a thousand miles to hold it in their hands and make a wish, which, if uttered with _faith_, is always granted. Its possession alone ent.i.tles any one to the first rank as master in the mysteries of Voodoo sorcery. Truly I began early in the business! I may here say that since I owned the Voodoo stone it has been held in several very famous and a few very beautiful hands.

While I was at Mr. Greene's I wrote my first poem. I certainly exhibited no great precocity of lyrical genius in it, but the reader must remember that I was only a foolish little boy of ten or eleven at the time, and that I showed it to no one. It was as follows:

"As a long-bearded Sultan, an infidel Turk, Who ne'er in his life had done any work, Rode along to the bath, he saw Ha.s.san the black, With two monstrous water-skins high on his back.

"'Ho, Ha.s.san, thou afreet! thou infidel dog!

Thou son of a Jewess and eater of hog!

This instant, this second, put down thy skin jugs, And for my sovereign pleasure remove both the plugs!'

"The negro obeyed him, put both on the ground, And opened the skins and the water flew round; The Sultan looked on till he laughed his fill; Then went on to the bath, feeling heated and ill.

"When arrived at the bath, 'Is all ready?' he cries.

'Indeed it is not, sire,' the bath-man replies; 'For to fetch the bath-water black Ha.s.san has gone, And your highness can't have it till he shall return.'"

In after years my friend, Professor E. H. Palmer, translated this into Arabic, and promised me that it should be sung in the East. It is not much of a poem, even for a boy, but there is one touch true to life in it--which is the _cursing_. This must have come to me by revelation; and in after years in Cairo I never heard a native address another as "_Afrit_! _Ya-hinzeer_--_wa Yahud_--_yin uldeen ak_?"--"curse your religion!"--but I thought how marvellous it was that I, even in my infancy, had divined so well how they did it! However, now I come to think of it, I had the year before read Morier's "Haji-Baba" with great admiration, and I doubt not that it was the influence of that remarkable book which produced this beautiful result. In after years I met with a lady who was a daughter of Morier. Apropos of the _book_, it reminds me that I specially recall my _reviewing_ it mentally many times.

I have reviewed my early life in quiet, old-fashioned, shaded Philadelphia and in rural New England so continually and carefully all the time ever since it pa.s.sed that I am sure its minutest detail on any day would now be accurately recalled at the least suggestion. As I shall almost certainly write this whole work without referring to a note or journal or other doc.u.ment, it will be seen that I remember the past pretty well. What is most remarkable in it all, if I _can_ make myself intelligible, is that what between the deep and indelible impression made on my mind by _books_, and that of scenery and characters now pa.s.sed away--the two being connected--it all seems to me now to be as it were vividly depicted, coloured, or _written_ in my mind, like pages in an illuminated or ill.u.s.trated romance. As some one has said that dreams are novels which we read when asleep, so bygone memories, when continually revived and a.s.sociated with the subtle and delicate influences of _reading_, really become fixed literature to us, glide into it, and are virtually turned to copy, which only awaits type. Thus a _scene_ to one highly cultivated in art is really a picture, to a degree which few actually realise, though they may fancy they do, because to actually master this harmony requires so many years of study and thought that I very rarely meet with perfect instances of it. De Quincey and Coleridge are two of the best ill.u.s.trations whom I can recall, while certain a.n.a.lytical character-sifters in modern novels seem the farthest remote from such genial naturalness.

At the end of the first year my brother returned to Philadelphia. I pa.s.sed the summer at Dr. Stimson's, in Dedham, wandering about in the woods with my bow, fishing in the river, reading always whatever fate or a small circulating library provided--I remember that "The Devil on Two Sticks" and the "Narrative of Captain Boyle" were in it--and carving spoons and serpents from wood, which was a premonition of my later work in this line, and of my "Manual of Wood-Carving."

At this time something took place which deeply impressed me. This was the two hundredth anniversary of the building of the town of Dedham, which was celebrated with very great splendour: speeches, tents with pine- boughs, music-booths, ginger-beer, side-shows--in short, all the pomp and circ.u.mstance of a country fair allied to historic glory. I had made one or two rather fast and, I fear me, not over-reputable acquaintances of my own age, with whom I enjoyed the festival to the utmost. Then I returned to school, and autumn came, and then winter. At this time I felt fearfully lonely. I yearned for my mother with a longing beyond words, and was altogether home-sick.

I was seated one Sat.u.r.day afternoon, busily working in the drawing-cla.s.s under a little old Englishman named Dr. Hunt, when there came the startling news that a gentleman had come to take me home! I could hardly believe my senses. I went down, and was presented to a man of about thirty, of extremely pleasant and attractive appearance, who told me that his name was Carlisle, that he was a friend of my father's, and that I was at once to return with him to Philadelphia. I wonder that I did not faint with joy. Mr. Carlisle was a man of very remarkable intelligence, kindness, and refinement. Nearly sixty years have pa.s.sed since then, and yet the memory of the delightful impression which he made on me is as fresh as ever. My trunk was soon packed; we were whirled away to Boston, and went to a hotel, he treating me altogether like a young gentleman and an equal.

It had been the dream and hope and wild desire of my life to go to the Lion Theatre in Boston, where circus was combined with roaring maritime melodramas, of which I had heard heavenly accounts from a few of my schoolmates. And Mr. Carlisle took me there that evening, and I saw "Hyder Ali." Never, never in my life before did I dream that dramatic art, poetry, and _mimesis_ could attain to such ideal splendour. And then a sailor came on the stage and sang "Harry Bluff," and when he came to the last line--

"And he died like a true Yankee sailor at last,"

amid thundering hurrahs, it seemed to me that romance could go no farther. I do not think that Mr. Carlisle had any knowledge of boys, certainly not of such a boy as I was, but I am sure that he must have been amply repaid for his kindness to me in my delight. And there were acrobatic performances, such as I had never seen in my life, and we returned to the hotel and a grand supper, and I was in heaven.

The next morning Mr. Carlisle put into my hand, with great delicacy, such a sum as I had never before possessed, telling me that I "would need it for travelling expenses." All the while he drew me out on literature. On the Long Island Sound steamer he bade me notice a young gentleman (whom I was destined to know in after years), a man with curly hair and very foppish air, accompanied by a page "in an eruption of b.u.t.tons," and told me that it was N. P. Willis. And so revelling in romance and travel, with mince-pie and turkey for my daily food, my pocket stuffed with money, in the most refined and elegant literary society (at least it was there on deck), I came to Philadelphia. I may here say that the memory of Mr. Carlisle has made me through all my life kinder to boys than I might otherwise have been; and if, as a teacher, I have been popular among them, it was to a great degree due to his influence. For, as will appear in many pa.s.sages in this book, I have to a strange degree the habit of thinking over marked past experiences, and drawing from them precedents by which to guide my conduct; hence it has often happened that a single incident has shown itself in hundreds of others, as a star is reflected in countless pools.

II. BOYHOOD AND YOUTH. 1837-1845.

Return to Philadelphia at twelve years of age--Early discipline--School at Mr. C. Walker's--B. P. Hunt--My first reading of Rabelais--Mr. Robert Stewart--Hurlbut's school--Boyish persecution--Much strange reading--Francois Villon--Early studies in philosophy--Transcendentalism and its influence--Spanish--School of E. C. Wines--The French teacher--Long illness--The intelligent horse--Princeton University professors--Albert Dodd and James Alexander--College life--Theology--Rural scenes--Reading--My first essays--The Freshman rebellion--Smoking--George H. Boker--Jacob Behmen or Bohme--Stonington--Captain Nat Palmer and Commodore Vanderbilt--My graduation.

How happy I was again to see my mother and father and Henry! And then came other joys. My father had taken a very nice house in Walnut Street, in the best quarter of the city, below Thirteenth Street, and this was a source of pleasure, as was also a barrel of apples in the cellar, to which I had free access. They had been doled out to us very sparingly at school, and I never shall forget the delight with which I one day in December at Jamaica Plain discovered a frozen apple on a tree! Then there was the charm of being in a great city, and familiar old scenes, and the freedom from bad marks, and being ruled into bounds, and sent to bed at early hours. There is, in certain cases, a degree of moral restraint and discipline which is often carried much too far, especially where boys are brought up with a view to pushing themselves in the world.

I was sixteen years of age and six feet high before I was allowed to leave off short jackets, go to a theatre, or travel alone, all of which was more injurious to me, I believe, than ordinary youthful dissipation would have been, especially in America. Yet, while thus repressed, I was being continually referred by all grown-up friends to enterprising youth of my own age, who were making a living in bankers' or conveyancers'

offices, &c., and acting "like men." The result really being that I was completely convinced that I was a person of feeble and inferior capacity as regarded all that was worth doing or knowing in life, though Heaven knows my very delicate health and long illnesses might of themselves have excused all my failings. The vast majority of Americans, however kind and generous they may be in other respects, are absolutely without mercy or common-sense as regards the not succeeding in life or making money.

Such, at least, was my experience, and bitter it was. Elders often forget that even obedience, civility, and morality in youth are luxuries which must be paid for like all other extravagances at a high price, especially in children of feeble const.i.tution. The dear boy grows up "as good as pie," and, being pious, "does not know one card from another,"

nor one human being from another. You make of him a fool, and then call him one--I mean, what you regard as a fool. I am not at all sure that one or two cruises in a slaver (there were plenty of them sailing out of New York in those days) would not have done me far more good of a certain kind than all the education I had till I left college in America. I am not here complaining, as most weak men do, as if they were specially victims to a wretched fate and a might-have-been-better. The vast majority of boys have not better homes or education, kinder parents, or advantages greater than mine were. But as I do not recall my boyhood's days or my youth till I left college with that _joyousness_ which I find in other men without exception, and as, in fact, there always seems as if a cloud were over it all, while from below there was a low continual murmur as of a patient soul in pain, I feel that there was something wrong in it all, as there indeed was--the wrong of taking all the starch out of a shirt, and then wondering that it was not stiff. But I must say, at the same time, that this free expansion is not required by the vast majority of boys, who are only far too ready and able to spread themselves into "life" without any aid whatever. What is for one meat may be for another poison, and mine was a very exceptional case, which required very peculiar treatment.

My father had sold out his business in 1832 to Mr. Charles S. Boker, and since then been princ.i.p.ally engaged in real estate and stock speculation.

When I returned, he had bought a large property between Chestnut Market and Third Streets, on which was a hotel called Congress Hall, with which there were connected many historical a.s.sociations, for most of the noted men who for many years visited Philadelphia had lived in it. With it were stables and other buildings, covering a great deal of ground in the busiest portion of the city, but still not in its condition very profitable. Then, again, he purchased the old Arch Street prison, a vast gloomy pile, like four dead walls, a building nearly 400 feet square. It was empty, and I went over it and into the cells many times. I remember thinking of the misery and degradation of those who had been confined there. The discipline had been bad enough, for the prisoners had been allowed to herd freely together. My father tore it down, and built a block of handsome dwelling-houses on its site. As the _trottoir_ or side- walk was narrow, he, at a considerable loss to himself, made a present to the city of a strip of land which left a wide pavement. I say "at a loss," for had the houses been deeper they would have sold for much more.

The City Council graciously accepted the gift, with the special condition that my father should pay all the expenses of the transfer! From which I learned the lesson that in this life a man is quite as liable to suffer from doing good as doing evil, unless he employs just as much foresight or caution in the doing thereof. Some of the most deeply regretted acts of my life, which have caused me most sincere and oft-renewed repentance, were altogether and perfectly acts of generosity and goodness. The simple truth of which is that a _gush_, no matter how sweet and pure the water may be, generally displaces something. Many more buildings did my father buy and sell, but committed withal the very serious error of never buying a house as a permanent home or a country place, which he might have easily done, and even to great profit, which error in the long-run caused us all great inconvenience, and much of that shifting from place to place which is very bad for a growing family. The humblest man in such case in a house of his own has certain great advantages over even a millionaire in lodgings.

Mr. S. C. Walker had given over his school to a younger brother named Joseph, but it was still kept in the old house in Eighth Street, where also I had taken my lessons in the rudiments of Transcendentalism from the Orphic Alcott. It was now a fairly good school as things went in those days, with the same lectures in Natural Philosophy and Chemistry--the same mild doses of French and Latin. The chief a.s.sistant was E. Otis Kimball, subsequently a professor of astronomy, a very gentlemanly and capable instructor, of a much higher type than any a.s.sistant-teacher whom I had ever before met. Under him I read Voltaire's "Charles the Twelfth." George H. Boker, who was one year older than I, and the son of my father's old partner, went to this school. I do not remember that for the first year or eighteen mouths after my return to Philadelphia there was any incident of note in my life, or that I read anything unless it was Shakespeare, and reviews which much influenced me. However, I was very wisely allowed to attend a gymnasium, kept by a man named Hudson. Here there was a sporting tone, much pistol-shooting at a mark, boxing and fencing, prints of prize-fighters on the wall, and cuts from _Life in London_, with copious cigar-smoke. It was a wholesome, healthy place for me. Unfortunately, I could not afford the shooting, boxing, &c., but I profited somewhat by it, both morally and physically. At this critical period, or a little later, a few pounds a year judiciously invested in sport and "dissipation" would have changed the whole current of my life, probably much for the better, and it would certainly have spared my poor father the conviction, which he had almost to his death, that I was a sad and mortifying failure or exception which had not paid its investment; for which opinion he was in no wise to blame, it being also that of all his business acquaintances, many of whose sons, it was true, went utterly to the devil, but then it was in the ancient intelligible, common-sensible, usual paths of gambling, horsing, stock-brokering, selling short, or ruining all their relatives by speculating with their money. However, there was also the--rather forlorn--hope ahead that I would do something in a profession.

The school went on, Mr. Walker studying law meantime till he had pa.s.sed his examination, when it was transferred to Mr. B. P. Hunt. With this man, who became and remained my intimate friend till his death, thirty years after, came the first faint intimation of what was destined to be the most critical, the most singular, and by far the most important period of my life.

Mr. Hunt was, as he himself declared to me in after years, not at all fitted to be a schoolmaster. He lacked the minor or petty earnestness of character, and even the training or preparation, necessary for such work.

On the other hand, he had read a great deal in a desultory way; he was very fond of all kinds of easy literature; and when he found that any boy understood the subject, he would talk with that boy about whatever he had been reading. Yet there was something real and stimulative in him, for there never was a man in Philadelphia who kept school for so short a time and with so few pupils who had among them so many who in after life became more or less celebrated. For he certainly made all of us who were above idiocy think and live in thought above the ordinary range of school- boy life. Thus I can recall these two out of many incidents:--

Finding me one day at an old book-stand, he explained to me Alduses, and Elzevirs, and bibliography, showing me several specimens, all of which I remembered.

I had read Watson's "Annals of Philadelphia." [By the way, I knew the daughter of the author.] There was an allusion in it to Cornelius Agrippa, and Mr. Hunt explained and dilated on this great sorcerer to me till I became half crazy to read the "Occult Philosophy," which I did at a roaring rate two years later.

One day I saw Mr. Hunt and Mr. Kendall chuckling together over a book. I divined a secret. Now, I was a very honourable boy, and never pried into secrets, but where a quaint old book was concerned I had no more conscience than a pirate. And seeing Mr. Hunt put the book into his desk, I abode my time till he had gone forth, when I raised the lid, and . . .

Merciful angels and benevolent fairies! it was Urquhart's translation of Rabelais! One short spell I read, no more; but it raised a devil which has never since been laid. Ear hath not heard, it hath not entered into the heart of man to conceive, what I felt as I realised, like a young giant just awakened, that there was in me a stupendous mental strength to grasp and understand that magnificent mixture of ribaldry and learning, fun and wisdom, deviltry and divinity. In a few pages' time I knew what it all meant, and that I was gifted to understand it. I replaced the book; nor did I read it again for years, but from that hour I was never quite the same person. The next day I saw Callot's "Temptation of St.

Anthony" for the first time in a shop-window, and felt with joy and pride that I understood it out of Rabelais. Two young gentlemen--lawyers apparently--by my side thought it was crazy and silly. To me it was more like an apocalypse.

I am speaking plain truth when I say that that one quarter of an hour's reading of Rabelais--standing up--was to me as the light which flashed upon Saul journeying to Damascus. It seems to me now as if it were the great event of my life. It came to such a pa.s.s in after years that I could have identified any line in the Chronicle of Gargantua, and I also was the suggester, father, and founder in London of the Rabelais Club, in which were many of the best minds of the time, but beyond it all and brighter than all was that first revelation.

It should be remembered that I had already perused Sterne, much of Swift, and far more comic and satiric literature than is known to boys, and, what is far more remarkable, had thoroughly taken it all into my _cor cordium_ by much repet.i.tion and reflection.

Mr. Hunt in time put me up to a great deal of very valuable or curious _belletristic_ fair-lettered or black-lettered reading, far beyond my years, though not beyond my intelligence and love. We had been accustomed to pa.s.s to our back-gate of the school through Blackberry Alley--

"Blackberry Alley, now Duponceau Street, A rose by any name will smell as sweet"--

which was tenanted princ.i.p.ally by social evils. He removed to the corner of Seventh and Chestnut Streets. Under our schoolroom there was a gambling den. I am not aware that these surroundings had any effect whatever upon the pupils. Among the pupils in Seventh Street was one named Emile Tourtelot. We called him Oatmeal Turtledove. I had another friend who was newly come from Connecticut. His uncle kept a hotel and often gave him Havanna cigars. We often took long walks together out of town and smoked them. He taught me the song--