r other reasons. The fancy
nourished upon

"The glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome,"

starved amid the robust plenty of the Englishman's criticisms of our
early manners and customs. Neither could money hire the boy to read
_Malte-Brun's Geography_, in three large folios, of a thousand pages
each, for which there was a standing offer of fifty cents from the
father, who had never been able to read it himself.

But shortly after he failed so miserably with Captain Ashe, the boy came
into possession of a priceless treasure. It was that little treatise on
_Greek and Roman Mythology_ which I have mentioned, and which he must
literally have worn out with reading, since no fragment of it seems to
have survived his boyhood. Heaven knows who wrote it or published it;
his father bought it with a number of other books at an auction, and the
boy, who had about that time discovered the chapter on prosody in the
back part of his grammar, made poems from it for years, and appeared in
many transfigurations, as this and that god and demigod and hero upon
imagined occasions in the Boy's Town, to the fancied admiration of all
the other fellows. I do not know just why he wished to appear to his
grandmother in a vision; now as Mercury with winged feet, now as Apollo
with his drawn bow, now as Hercules leaning upon his club and resting
from his Twelve Labors. Perhaps it was because he thought that his
grandmother, who used to tell the children about her life in Wales, and
show them the picture of a castle where she had once slept when she was
a girl, would appreciate him in these apotheoses. If he believed they
would make a vivid impression upon the sweet old Quaker lady, no doubt
he was right.

There was another book which he read about this time, and that was _The
Greek Soldier_. It was the story of a young Greek, a glorious Athenian,
who had fought through the Greek war of independence against the Turks,
and then come to America and published the narrative of his adventures.
They fired my boy with a retrospective longing to have been present at
the Battle of Navarino, when the allied ships of the English, French,
and Russians destroyed the Turkish fleet; but it seemed to him that he
could not have borne to have the allies impose a king upon the Greeks,
when they really wanted a republic, and so he was able to console
himself for having been absent. He did what he could in fighting the war
over again, and he i