. Three of our neighborhood boys were then teaching in or
near Plainfield, and I sought them out, having my first ride on the cars
on that trip from Jersey City. As I sat there in my seat waiting for the
train to start, I remember I actually wondered if the starting would be
so sudden as to jerk my hat off!

I was too late to find a vacancy in any of the schools in the districts
I visited. On one occasion I walked from Somerville twelve miles to a
village where there was a vacancy, but the trustees, after looking
me over, concluded I was too young and inexperienced for their large
school. That night the occultation of Venus by the moon took place. I
remember gazing at it long and long.

On my return in May I stopped in New York and spent a day prowling about
the second-hand bookstalls, and spent so much of my money for books that
I had only enough left to carry me to Griffin's Corners, twelve miles
from home. I bought Locke's "Essay on the Human Understanding," Dr.
Johnson's works, Saint-Pierre's "Studies of Nature," and Dick's works
and others. Dick was a Scottish philosopher whose two big fat volumes
held something that caught my mind as I dipped into them. But I got
little from him and soon laid him aside. On this and other trips to New
York I was always drawn by the second-hand bookstalls. How I hovered
about them, how good the books looked, how I wanted them all! To this
day, when I am passing them, the spirit of those days lays its hand upon
me, and I have to pause a few moments and, half-dreaming, half-longing,
run over the titles. Nearly all my copies of the English classics I have
picked up at these curbstone stalls. How much more they mean to me than
new books of later years! Here, for instance, are two volumes of Dr.
Johnson's works in good leather binding, library style, which I have
carried with me from one place to another for over fifty years, and
which in my youth I read and reread, and the style of which I tried
to imitate before I was twenty. When I dip into "The Rambler" and "The
Idler" now how dry and stilted and artificial their balanced sentences
seem! yet I treasure them for what they once were to me. In my first
essay in the "Atlantic," forty-six years ago (in 1860), I said that
Johnson's periods acted like a lever of the third kind, and that the
power applied always exceeded the weight raised; and this comparison
seems to hit the mark very well. I did not read Boswell's Life of him
till much la