ion as if while feeling he was ever
superior to it. He was a great actor, who had gone far beyond acting or
art.

Owing, I suppose, to business losses, my father and family lived for two
years either at Congress Hall Hotel or _en pension_. I spent my first
vacation at the former place. There lived in the house a Colonel John Du
Solle, the editor of a newspaper. He was a good-natured, rather
dissipated man, who kept horses and had a fancy for me, and took me out
"on drives," and once introduced me in the street to a great actress,
Susan Cushman, {101} and very often to theatres and coffee-houses and
reporters, and printed several of my lucubrations. Du Solle was in after
years secretary to P. T. Barnum, whom I also knew well. He was kind to
me, and I owe him this friendly mention. Some people thought him a
rather dangerous companion for youth, but I was never taken by him into
bad company or places, nor did I ever hear from him a word of which my
parents would have disapproved. But I really believe that I could at
that time, or any other, have kept company with the devil and not been
much harmed: it was not in me. Edgar A. Poe was often in Du Solle's
office and at Congress Hall.

In the summer we all went to Stonington, Connecticut, where we lived at a
hotel called the Wadawanuc House. There I went out sailing--once on a
clam-bake excursion in a yacht owned by Captain Nat. Palmer, who had
discovered Palmer's Land--and sailed far and wide. That summer I also
saw on his own deck the original old Vanderbilt himself, who was then the
captain of a Sound steamboat; and I bathed every day in salt-water, and
fished from the wharf, and smoked a great deal, and read French books;
and after a while we went into Massachusetts and visited the dear old
villages and Boston, and so on, till I had to return to Princeton. Soon
after my father took another house in Walnut Street, the next door above
the one where we had lived. This one was rather better, for though it
had less garden, it had larger back-buildings.

_Bon an_, _mal an_, the time passed away at Princeton for four years. I
was often very ill. In the last year the physician who tested my lungs
declared they were unsound in two places; and about this time I was
believed to have contracted an incurable stoop in the shoulders. One day
I resolved that from _that minute_ I would always hold myself straight
upright; and I did so, and in the course of time became as