et me buy a certain book, which he did. This
work, which was as dear to me as a new doll to a girl for a long time,
was the _Reductorium_ or moralisation of the whole Bible by Petrus
Berchorius, black-letter, folio, Basle, 1511. It was from the library of
a great and honest scholar, and, as the catalogue stated, "contained MS.
notes on the margin by Melanchthon."

Promising, this, for an American youth who was expected to go into
business or study a profession!

While at Hurlbut's school I took lessons in Spanish. There was a Spanish
boy from Malaga, a kind of half-servant, _half-protege_ in a family near
us, with whom I practised speaking the language, and also had some
opportunity with a few Cubans who visited our family. One of them had
been a governor-general. He was a Gallician by birth, but I did not know
this, and innocently asked him one day if _los Gallegos no son los
Irlandeses d'Espana_?--if the Gallicians were not the Irish of
Spain--which drew a grave caution from my brother, who knew better than I
how the land lay. I really attained some skill in Spanish, albeit to
this day "Don Quixote" demands from me a great deal of dictionary. But,
as I said before, I learn languages with _incredible_ difficulty, a fact
which I cannot reconcile with the extreme interest which I take in
philology and linguistics, and the discoveries which I have made; as, for
instance, that of _Shelta_ in England, or my labours in jargons, such as
Pidgin-English, Slang, and Romany. But, as the reader has probably
perceived, I was a boy with an inherited good constitution only from the
paternal side, and a not very robust one from my mother, while my mind,
weakened by long illness, had been strangely stimulated by many
disorders, nervous fevers being frequent among them. In those days I
was, as my mother said, almost brought up on calomel--and she might have
added quinine. The result of so much nervousness, excessive stimulating
by medicine, and rapid growth was a too great susceptibility to poetry,
humour, art, and all that was romantic, quaint, and mysterious, while I
found it very hard to master any really dry subject. What would have set
me all right would have been careful physical culture, boxing, so as to
protect me from my school persecutors, and _amusement_ in a healthy
sense, of which I had almost none whatever.

Hurlbut's became at last simply intolerable, and my parents, finding out
in some way that I was worse f