ries, then new; and the boy had a good deal of trouble with the
"Haunted Man." One rarest night of all, the family sat up till two
o'clock, listening to a novel that my boy long ago forgot the name of,
if he ever knew its name. It was all about a will, forged or lost, and
there was a great scene in court, and after that the mother declared
that she could not go to bed till she heard the end. His own first
reading was in history. At nine years of age he read the history of
Greece, and the history of Rome, and he knew that Goldsmith wrote them.
One night his father told the boys all about Don Quixote; and a little
while after he gave my boy the book. He read it over and over again; but
he did not suppose it was a novel. It was his elder brother who read
novels, and a novel was like "Handy Andy," or "Harry Lorrequer," or the
"Bride of Lammermoor." His brother had another novel which they
preferred to either; it was in Harper's old "Library of Select Novels,"
and was called "Alamance; or, the Great and Final Experiment," and it
was about the life of some sort of community in North Carolina. It
bewitched them, and though my boy could not afterwards recall a single
fact or figure in it, he could bring before his mind's eye every trait
of its outward aspect. It was at this time that his father bought an
English-Spanish grammar from a returned volunteer, who had picked it up
in the city of Mexico, and gave it to the boy. He must have expected him
to learn Spanish from it; but the boy did not know even the parts of
speech in English. As the father had once taught English grammar in six
lessons, from a broadside of his own authorship, he may have expected
the principle of heredity to help the boy; and certainly he did dig the
English grammar out of that blessed book, and the Spanish language with
it, but after many long years, and much despair over the difference
between a preposition and a substantive.

All this went along with great and continued political excitement, and
with some glimpses of the social problem. It was very simple then;
nobody was very rich, and nobody was in want; but somehow, as the boy
grew older, he began to discover that there were differences, even in
the little world about him; some were higher and some were lower. From
the first he was taught by precept and example to take the side of the
lower. As the children were denied oftener than they were indulged, the
margin of their own abundance must have been