ll set on Latin without advice of the master;
and yet, when he learned, which he soon did, to distinguish and call us
up to our tasks by the name of the "heavy class," I was, in most
instances, to be found at its nether end. Shortly after, however, when
we got a little farther on, it was seen that I had a decided turn for
translation. The master, good simple man that he was, always read to us
in English, as the school met, the piece of Latin given us as our task
for the day; and as my memory was strong enough to carry away the whole
translation in its order, I used to give him back in the evening, word
for word, his own rendering, which satisfied him on most occasions
tolerably well. There were none of us much looked after; and I soon
learned to bring books of amusement to the school with me, which, amid
the Babel confusion of the place, I contrived to read undetected. Some
of them, save in the language in which they were written, were identical
with the books proper to the place. I remember perusing by stealth in
this way, Dryden's "Virgil," and the "Ovid" of Dryden and his friends;
while Ovid's own "Ovid," and Virgil's own "Virgil," lay beside me,
sealed up in the fine old tongue, which I was thus throwing away my only
chance of acquiring.

One morning, having the master's English rendering of the day's task
well fixed in my memory, and no book of amusement to read, I began
gossiping with my nearest class-fellow, a very tall boy, who ultimately
shot up into a lad of six feet four, and who on most occasions sat
beside me, as lowest in the form save one. I told him about the tall
Wallace and his exploits; and so effectually succeeded in awakening his
curiosity, that I had to communicate to him, from beginning to end,
every adventure recorded by the blind minstrel. My story-telling
vocation once fairly ascertained, there was, I found, no stopping in my
course. I had to tell all the stories I ever heard or read; all my
father's adventures, so far as I knew them, and all my Uncle
Sandy's,--with the story of Gulliver, and Philip Quarll, and Robinson
Crusoe,--of Sinbad, and Ulysses, and Mrs. Radcliffe's heroine Emily,
with, of course, the love-passages left out; and at length, after weeks
and months of narrative, I found my available stock of acquired fact
and fiction fairly exhausted. The demand on the part of my
class-fellows was, however, as great and urgent as ever; and, setting
myself, in the extremity of the case, to t