ld 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-office without that tender swelling of the heart
which so fondly responds to any memory-bearing perfume: his youth, his
boyhood, almost his infancy came back to him in it. He now looked
forward eagerly to helping on the new paper, and somewhat proudly to
living in the larger place the family were going to. The moment it was
decided he began to tell the boys that he was going to live in a city,
and he felt that it gave him distinction. He had nothing but joy in it,
and he did not dream that as the time drew near it could be sorrow. But
when it came at last, and he was to leave the house, the town, the boys,
he found himself deathly homesick. The parting days were days of gloom;
the parting was an anguish of bitter tears. Nothing consoled him but the
fact that they were going all the way to the new place in a canal-boat,
which his father chartered for the trip. My boy and his brother had once
gone to Cincinnati in a canal-boat, with a friendly captain of their
acquaintance, and, though they were both put to sleep in a berth so
narrow that when they turned they fell out on the floor, the glory of
the adventure remained with him, and he could have thought of nothing
more delightful than such another voyage. The household goods were piled
up in the middle of the boat, and the family had a cabin forward, which
seemed immense to the children. They played in it and ran races up and
down the long canal-boat roof, where their father and mother sometimes
put their chairs and sat to admire the scenery.

As my boy could remember very few incidents of this voyage afterwards, I
dare say he spent a great part of it with his face in a book, and was
aware of the landscape only from time to time when he lifted his eyes
from the story he was reading. That was apt to be the way with him; and
before he left the Boy's Town the world within claimed him more and
more. He ceased to be that eager comrade he had once been; sometimes he
left his book with a sigh; and he saw much of the outer world through a
veil of fancies quivering like an autumn haze between him and its
realities, softening their harsh outlines, and giving them a fairy
coloring. I think he would sometimes have been better employed in
looking directly at them; but he had to live his own life, and I cannot
live it over for him. The season was the