igurations, 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 intended to harden himself for the long struggle by
sleeping on the floor, as the Greek soldier had done. But the children
often fell asleep on the floor in the warmth of the hearth-fire; and his
preparation for the patriotic strife was not distinguishable in its
practical effect from a reluctance to go to bed at the right hour.

Captain Riley's narrative of his shipwreck on the coast of Africa, and
his captivity among the Arabs, was a book which my boy and his brother
prized with a kind of personal interest, because their father told them
that he had once seen a son of Captain Riley when he went to get his
appointment of collector at Columbus, and that this son was named
William Willshire Riley, after the good English merchant, William
Willshire, who had ransomed Captain Riley. William Willshire seemed to
them almost the best man who ever lived; though my boy had secretly a
greater fondness for the Arab, Sidi Hamet, who was kind to Captain Riley
and kept his brother Seid from ill-treating him whenever he could