o have his brother mock him,
and come up and say from time to time, "He who picketh up this cap
picketh up a fortune," and then split into a jeering laugh. At least he
could fight his brother, and, when he ran, could stone him; and he could
throw quads and quoins, and pieces of riglet at the jour printers when
the story spread to them, and one of them would begin, "He who
picketh--"

He could not make anything either of Byron or Cowper; and he did not
even try to read the little tree-calf volumes of Homer and Virgil which
his father had in the versions of Pope and Dryden; the small
copper-plates with which they were illustrated conveyed no suggestion to
him. Afterward he read Goldsmith's _Deserted Village_, and he formed a
great passion for Pope's _Pastorals_, which he imitated in their easy
heroics; but till he came to read Longfellow, and Tennyson, and Heine,
he never read any long poem without more fatigue than pleasure. His
father used to say that the taste for poetry was an acquired taste, like
the taste for tomatoes, and that he would come to it yet; but he never
came to it, or so much of it as some people seemed to do, and he always
had his sorrowful misgivings as to whether they liked it as much as they
pretended. I think, too, that it should be a flavor, a spice, a sweet, a
delicate relish in the high banquet of literature, and never a chief
dish; and I should not know how to defend my boy for trying to make long
poems of his own at the very time when he found it so hard to read other
people's long poems.

V

THE LAST OF A BOY'S TOWN

THE LAST OF A BOY'S TOWN

My boy was twelve years old, and was already a swift compositor, though
he was still so small that he had to stand on a chair to reach the case
in setting type on Taylor's inaugural message. But what he lacked in
stature he made up in gravity of demeanor; and he got the name of "The
Old Man" from the printers as soon as he began to come about the office,
which he did almost as soon as he could walk. His first attempt in
literature, an essay on the vain and disappointing nature of human life,
he set up and printed off himself in his sixth or seventh year; and the
printing-office was in some sort his home, as well as his school, his
university. He could no more remember learning to set type than he could
remember learning to read; and in after-life he could not come within
smell of the ink, the dusty types, the humid paper, of a printing