d 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
afterwards. First of them was Goldsmith's "History of Greece," which
made him an Athenian of Pericles's 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, for other reasons.
The fancy nourished upon

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

starved amidst 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
transf