t startled
me was a familiar-looking copy of Mrs. Trimmer's "Natural History," in
which at the end was my boyish signature.

"And still wider." In 1887 I passed some weeks at a hotel in Venice. A
number of Italian naval officers dined at our _table-d'hote_ every
evening. One of them showed us an intaglio which he had bought. It
represented a hunter on an elephant firing at a tiger. The owner wished
to know something about it. Baron von Rosenfeld, a chamberlain of the
Emperor of Austria, remarked at once that it was as old as the days of
flint-locks, because smoke was rising from the lock of the gun. I felt
that I knew more about it, but could not at once recall what I knew, and
said that I would explain it the next day. And going into the past, I
remembered that this very scene was the frontispiece to Mrs. Trimmer's
"Natural History." I think that some gem engraver, possibly in India,
had copied it to order. I can even now recall many other things in the
book, but attribute my retention of so much which I have read _not_ to a
good memory, such as the mathematician has, which grasps _directly_, but
simply to frequent reading and mental reviewing or revising. Where there
has been none of this, I forgot everything in a short time.

My father took in those years _Blackwood's_ and the _New Monthly
Magazine_, and as I read every line of them, they were to me a vast
source of knowledge. I remember an epigram by "Martial in London" in the
latter:--

"In Craven Street, Strand, four attorneys find place,
And four dark coal-barges are moored at the base;
Fly, Honesty, fly--seek some safer retreat,
For there's craft on the river, and craft in the street."

I never pass by Craven Street without recalling this, and so it has come
to pass that by such memories and associations London in a thousand ways
is always reviving my early life in America.

The _Noctes Ambrosianae_ puzzled me, as did the Bible, but I read, read,
read, _toujours_. My uncle Amos lent me the "Arabian Nights," though my
father strictly prohibited it. But the zest of the forbidden made me
study it with wondrous love. The reader may laugh, but it is a fact that
having obtained "Mother Goose's Melodies," I devoured them with a strange
interest reflected from Washington Irving. The truth is, that my taste
had been so precociously developed, that I unconsciously found a
_literary_ merit or charm in them as I did in all fairy-tales, and I