d again from two to five. In winter we had,
instead of the early lesson, an hour in the evening. Something was
wanting in the system, and I believe that after a year and a half I knew
no more, as regards studies, than I did when I first entered.

When a boy's birthday came, he was allowed to have some special dainty
for us all. I was very much disgusted with the Boston boys when they
selected pork and beans, which I loathed. Some would choose
plum-pudding, others apple-pies. There were always two or three dishes
for breakfast, as, for instance, fried potatoes and butter, or cold meat,
or pan-dowdy--a kind of coarse and broken up apple-pie--with the tea and
bread and coffee, but we could only eat of one. There was rather too
much petty infant-schoolery in all this, but we got on very well. Pepper
and mustard were forbidden, but I always had a great natural craving for
these, and when I asked for them, Mr. Greene would shake his head, but
always ended by handing them to me. He was a _bon vivant_ himself, and
sympathised with me. There were one or two books also of a rather
peppery or spicy nature in his library, such as a collection of
rollicking London songs, at which he likewise shook his head when I asked
for them--but I got them. There I read for the first time all of Walter
Scott's novels, and the Percy Ballads, and some of Marryatt's romances,
and Hood's Annual, and Dr. Holmes's first poems.

There was in Mr. Greene's library a very curious and now rare work in
three volumes, published in Boston at some time in the twenties, called
"The Marvellous Depository." It consisted of old legends of Boston, such
as the story of "Peter Rugg," "Tom Walker and the Devil," "The Golden
Tooth," "Captain Kidd," "The Witch Flymaker," and an admirable collection
of unearthly German tales, such as "The Devil's Elixir," by Hoffmann
(abridged), "Jacob the Bowl," "Rubezahl," "Der Freyschutz," and many
more, but all of the unearthly blood-curdling kind. Singly, they were
appalling enough to any one in those days when the supernatural still
thrilled the strongest minds, but taken altogether for steady reading,
the book was a perfect Sabbat of deviltry and dramatic horrors. The
tales were well told, or translated in very simple but vigorous English,
and I pored over the collection and got it by heart, and borrowed it, and
took it to Dedham in the holidays, and into the woods, where I read it in
sunshine or twilight shade by the