. These prisms struck me as possessing peculiar
magnificence. One of them fell off one day, and I hastily grabbed it and
stowed it away, passing several days of furtive delight in the treasure,
a delight always alloyed with fear that I would be found out and
convicted of larceny. There was a Swiss wood-carving representing a very
big hunter on one side of an exceedingly small mountain, and a herd
of chamois, disproportionately small for the hunter and large for the
mountain, just across the ridge. This always fascinated us; but there
was a small chamois kid for which we felt agonies lest the hunter might
come on it and kill it. There was also a Russian moujik drawing a gilt
sledge on a piece of malachite. Some one mentioned in my hearing that
malachite was a valuable marble. This fixed in my mind that it was
valuable exactly as diamonds are valuable. I accepted that moujik as
a priceless work of art, and it was not until I was well in middle age
that it occurred to me that I was mistaken.

Now and then we children were taken round to our grandfather's house;
a big house for the New York of those days, on the corner of Fourteenth
Street and Broadway, fronting Union Square. Inside there was a large
hall running up to the roof; there was a tessellated black-and-white
marble floor, and a circular staircase round the sides of the hall, from
the top floor down. We children much admired both the tessellated floor
and the circular staircase. I think we were right about the latter, but
I am not so sure as to the tessellated floor.

The summers we spent in the country, now at one place, now at another.
We children, of course, loved the country beyond anything. We disliked
the city. We were always wildly eager to get to the country when spring
came, and very sad when in the late fall the family moved back to town.
In the country we of course had all kinds of pets--cats, dogs, rabbits,
a coon, and a sorrel Shetland pony named General Grant. When my younger
sister first heard of the real General Grant, by the way, she was much
struck by the coincidence that some one should have given him the same
name as the pony. (Thirty years later my own children had _their_ pony
Grant.) In the country we children ran barefoot much of the time,
and the seasons went by in a round of uninterrupted and enthralling
pleasures--supervising the haying and harvesting, picking apples,
hunting frogs successfully and woodchucks unsuccessfully, gathering
hi