whom I
had very little liking, to come and visit her, I replied with great
politeness, but also with marked firmness, "I am very much obliged to
you, ma'am, and thank you--but I _won't_."

In Washington Square, three doors from us, at the corner of Walnut
Street, lived Dr. George McClellan. He had two sons, one, John, of my
own age, the other, George, who was three years younger. Both went to
school with me in later years. George became a soldier, and finally rose
to the head of the army in the first year of the War of Rebellion, or
Emancipation, as I prefer to term it.

Washington Square, opposite our house, had been in the olden time a
Potter's Field, where all the victims of the yellow fever pestilence had
been interred. Now it had become a beautiful little park, but there were
legends of a myriad of white confused forms seen flitting over it in the
night, for it was a mysterious haunted place to many still, and I can
remember my mother gently reproving one of our pretty neighbours for
repeating such tales.

I have dreamy yet very oft-recurring memories of my life in childhood,
as, for instance, that just before I was quite three years old I had
given to me a copy of the old New England Primer, which I could not then
read, yet learned from others the rhymes with the quaint little cuts.

"In Adam's fall
We sin-ned all."

"My book and heart
Shall never part," &c.

Also of a gingerbread toy, with much sugar, colour, and gilding, and of
lying in a crib and having the measles. I can remember that I understood
the meaning of the word _dead_ before that of _alive_, because I told my
nurse that I had heard that Dr. Dewees was dead. But she replying that
he was not, but alive, I repeated "live" as one not knowing what it
meant.

I recollect, also, that one day, when poring over the pictures in a toy-
book, my Uncle Amos calling me a good little boy for so industriously
reading, I felt guilty and ashamed because I could not read, and did not
like to admit it. Whatever my faults or follies may be, I certainly had
an innate rectitude, a strong sense of honesty, just as many children
have the contrary; and this, I believe, is due to inherited qualities,
though these in turn are greatly modified by early association and
influences. That I also had precocious talent and taste for the
romantic, poetic, marvellous, quaint, supernatural, and humorous, was
soon manifested. Even as an infant objects of _b