I was only seven times one--the panting
exultation with which I flung into her lap the cheap colored print of
the Tower of Babel (showing the hurly-burly of French bricklayers and
Irish hod-carriers, and the grand row generally) that I had just won at
school by correctly committing to memory, and publicly reciting, the
whole of

"Almighty God, thy piercing eye
Strikes through the shades of night," etc.

My first prize! The Tower of Babel fell untimely into the wash-tub, but
she dried it on her warm bosom; and I have never forgotten that All our
secret actions lie All open to His sight; though I have never seen the
verses (they were in Comly's Spelling-Book) from that day to this.

In those days we had a youth of talent in the family,--a sort of
sophomorical boil, that the soap and sugar of indiscriminate adulation
had drawn to a head of conceit. This youth bestowed a great deal of
attention on a certain young woman of a classical turn of mind, who once
had a longing to attend a fancy-ball as a sibyl. About the same time
Sophomore missed the first volume of his Potter's "Antiquities of
Greece"; and, having searched for it in vain, made up his mind that I
had presented it as a keepsake, together with a lock of my hair and a
cent's worth of pea-nut taffy, to the head girl of the infant class at
my Sunday school. So Sophomore, being in morals a pedant and in
intellect a bully, accused me of appropriating the book, and offered me
a dollar if I would restore it to him. With swelling heart and quivering
lip I carried the wanton insult--my first great wrong--straight to Aunt
Judy, who, in her mild way, resented it as a personal outrage to her own
feelings, and tried to soothe and console me by assuring me that "it
would all rub out when it got dry." Three years later, as I was passing
the sibyl's house one morning, her mother met me at the door and handed
me an odd volume of Potter's "Antiquities of Greece," which she had just
discovered in some out-of-the-way corner, where it had been mislaid, and
which she desired me to hand to Sophomore with the sibyl's compliments,
thanks, regrets, and several other delicacies of the season. But I
handed it first to Aunt Judy, who gloried boisterously in my first
triumph. Sophomore patronized me magnificently with apologies; but if
the wrong never gets any drier than Aunt Judy's joyful eyes were then,
it never will rub out.

So heartily disgusted was I with this classical episod