it. Being the boy he was,
he was destined somehow to dwell half the time in a world of dreamery;
and I have tried to express how, when he had once got enough of villany,
he reformed his ideals and rather liked virtue.

THE WORLD OPENED BY BOOKS

Every boy is two or three boys, or twenty or thirty different kinds of
boys in one; he is all the time living many lives and forming many
characters; but it is a good thing if he can keep one life and one
character when he gets to be a man. He may turn out to be like an onion
when he is grown up, and be nothing but hulls, that you keep peeling
off, one after another, till you think you have got down to the heart,
at last, and then you have got down to nothing.

All the boys may have been like my boy in the Boy's Town, in having each
an inward being that was not the least like their outward being, but
that somehow seemed to be their real self, whether it truly was so or
not. But I am certain that this was the case with him, and that while
he was joyfully sharing the wild sports and conforming to the savage
usages of the boy's world about him, he was dwelling in a wholly
different world within him, whose wonders no one else knew. I could not
tell now these wonders any more than he could have told them then; but
it was a world of dreams, of hopes, of purposes, which he would have
been more ashamed to avow for himself than I should be to avow for him.
It was all vague and vast, and it came out of the books that he read,
and that filled his soul with their witchery, and often held him aloof
with their charm in the midst of the plays from which they could not
lure him wholly away, or at all away. He did not know how or when their
enchantment began, and he could hardly recall the names of some of them
afterward.

First of them was Goldsmith's _History of Greece_, which made him an
Athenian of Pericles' time, and Goldsmith's _History of Rome_, which
naturalized him in a Roman citizenship chiefly employed in slaying
tyrants; from the time of Appius Claudius down to the time of Domitian,
there was hardly a tyrant that he did not slay. After he had read these
books, not once or twice, but twenty times over, his father thought fit
to put into his hands _The Travels of Captain Ashe in North America_, to
encourage, or perhaps to test, his taste for useful reading; but this
was a failure. The captain's travels were printed with long esses, and
the boy could make nothing of them, fo