aused us all great inconvenience, and much of that shifting from place
to place which is very bad for a growing family. The humblest man in
such case in a house of his own has certain great advantages over even a
millionaire in lodgings.

Mr. S. C. Walker had given over his school to a younger brother named
Joseph, but it was still kept in the old house in Eighth Street, where
also I had taken my lessons in the rudiments of Transcendentalism from
the Orphic Alcott. It was now a fairly good school as things went in
those days, with the same lectures in Natural Philosophy and
Chemistry--the same mild doses of French and Latin. The chief assistant
was E. Otis Kimball, subsequently a professor of astronomy, a very
gentlemanly and capable instructor, of a much higher type than any
assistant-teacher whom I had ever before met. Under him I read
Voltaire's "Charles the Twelfth." George H. Boker, who was one year
older than I, and the son of my father's old partner, went to this
school. I do not remember that for the first year or eighteen mouths
after my return to Philadelphia there was any incident of note in my
life, or that I read anything unless it was Shakespeare, and reviews
which much influenced me. However, I was very wisely allowed to attend a
gymnasium, kept by a man named Hudson. Here there was a sporting tone,
much pistol-shooting at a mark, boxing and fencing, prints of
prize-fighters on the wall, and cuts from _Life in London_, with copious
cigar-smoke. It was a wholesome, healthy place for me. Unfortunately, I
could not afford the shooting, boxing, &c., but I profited somewhat by
it, both morally and physically. At this critical period, or a little
later, a few pounds a year judiciously invested in sport and
"dissipation" would have changed the whole current of my life, probably
much for the better, and it would certainly have spared my poor father
the conviction, which he had almost to his death, that I was a sad and
mortifying failure or exception which had not paid its investment; for
which opinion he was in no wise to blame, it being also that of all his
business acquaintances, many of whose sons, it was true, went utterly to
the devil, but then it was in the ancient intelligible, common-sensible,
usual paths of gambling, horsing, stock-brokering, selling short, or
ruining all their relatives by speculating with their money. However,
there was also the--rather forlorn--hope ahead that I would do so