et was impossible. Burton
was even more terrified than I. Stricken blind as well as dumb he
usually ended by helplessly staring at the words which, I conceive, had
suddenly become a blur to him.

No matter, we were taught to feel the force of these poems and to
reverence the genius that produced them, and that was worth while.
Falstaff and Prince Hal, Henry and his wooing of Kate, Wolsey and his
downfall, Shylock and his pound of flesh all became a part of our
thinking and helped us to measure the large figures of our own
literature, for Whittier, Bryant and Longfellow also had place in these
volumes. It is probable that Professor McGuffey, being a Southern man,
did not value New England writers as highly as my grandmother did,
nevertheless _Thanatopsis_ was there and _The Village Blacksmith_, and
extracts from _The Deer Slayer_ and _The Pilot_ gave us a notion that
in Cooper we had a novelist of weight and importance, one to put beside
Scott and Dickens.

A by-product of my acquaintance with one of the older boys was a stack
of copies of the _New York Weekly_, a paper filled with stories of noble
life in England and hair-breadth escapes on the plain, a shrewd mixture,
designed to meet the needs of the entire membership of a prairie
household. The pleasure I took in these tales should fill me with shame,
but it doesn't--I rejoice in the memory of it.

I soon began, also, to purchase and trade "Beadle's Dime Novels" and, to
tell the truth, I took an exquisite delight in _Old Sleuth_ and _Jack
Harkaway_. My taste was catholic. I ranged from _Lady Gwendolin_ to
_Buckskin Bill_ and so far as I can now distinguish one was quite as
enthralling as the other. It is impossible for any print to be as
magical to any boy these days as those weeklies were to me in 1871.

One day a singular test was made of us all. Through some agency now lost
to me my father was brought to subscribe for _The Hearth and Home_ or
some such paper for the farmer, and in this I read my first chronicle of
everyday life.

In the midst of my dreams of lords and ladies, queens and dukes, I found
myself deeply concerned with backwoods farming, spelling schools,
protracted meetings and the like familiar homely scenes. This serial
(which involved my sister and myself in many a spat as to who should
read it first) was _The Hoosier Schoolmaster_, by Edward Eggleston, and
a perfectly successful attempt to interest western readers in a story of
the middle bor