ins in summer, made up a glorious
world, full of interest; and the days seemed never long enough for all
my plans of pleasure.

I had no companions of my own age, nor did I feel the want of them; for
when my school hours were over I was free to follow the caprices of
my own fancy. There was in my isolation a sort of independence that
I gloried in. To be alone with my own day-dreams--my own ambitious
hopes--my own high-soaring thoughts--was an ecstasy of delight that I
would not have exchanged for any companionship. The very indulgence
of these humors soon rendered me unsuited for association with others,
whose ideas and habits appeared to me to be all vain, and trifling, and
contemptible. The books of travel and discovery which I loved to read,
had filled my mind with those stories of adventure which attend the
explorer of unknown lands,--the wonders of scenery, and the strange
pictures of life and people. There was in the career itself that
blending of heroism and philanthropy, that mingled courage and humanity,
which appealed to my heart by its very strongest sympathies; and I felt
for these noble and devoted adventurers not less admiration than love.
All my solitary rambles through the wild valleys of the neighborhood,
all my lonely walks over mountains, were in imitation of these
wanderers, whose hardships I envied, and whose perils I longed to share.
Not a rugged crag nor snow-capped summit that I did not name after some
far-away land; and every brook and rippling stream became to me the
Nile, the Euphrates, or the Ganges. The desolate character of the
scenery amidst which we lived, the wide tracts of uninhabited country,
favored these illusions; and for whole days long not an incident would
occur to break the spell which fancy had thrown around me.

My kind mother--for so Polly always taught me to call her--seemed to
take delight in favoring these self-delusions of mine, and fell readily
into all my caprices about locality.

She made me, too, with her own hands, a little knapsack to wear; bought
me an iron-shod staff such as Alpine travellers carry; and made me keep
a kind of journal of these wanderings, noting down all my accidents and
adventures, and recording even the feelings which beset me when afar
off and alone in the mountains. So intent did I become at last on these
imaginings that the actual life of school and its duties grew to seem
visionary and unreal, and my true existence to be that when wandering