ship. So that whatever has been recorded about the sensations of
extreme youth is probably all false. Why, even

"Heaven lies about us in our infancy,"--

as Wordsworth revealed in his "Ode on Immortality." And though
Tennyson pointed out that we try to revenge ourselves by lying about
heaven in our maturity, this does not serve to correct a single one of
crabbed age's misapprehensions about youth.

Games next inflamed my fancy. More than dominoes or Halma, lead
soldiers appealed to me, and tops, marbles, and battledore and
shuttlecock. Through tag, fire-engine, pom-pom-pull-away,
hide-and-seek, baseball, and boxing, I came to tennis, which I knew
instinctively was to be my athletic _grand passion_. Perhaps I was
first attracted by the game's constant humor which was forever making
the ball imitate or caricature humanity, or beguiling the players to
act like solemn automata. For children are usually quicker than
grown-ups to see these droll resemblances. I came by degrees to like
the game's variety, its tense excitement, its beauty of posture and
curve. And before long I vaguely felt what I later learned
consciously: that tennis is a sure revealer of character. Three sets
with a man suffice to give one a working knowledge of his moral
equipment; six, of his chief mental traits; and a dozen, of that most
important, and usually veiled part of him, his subconscious
personality. Young people of opposite sexes are sometimes counseled to
take a long railway journey together before deciding on a matrimonial
merger. But I would respectfully advise them rather to play "singles"
with each other before venturing upon a continuous game of doubles.

The collecting mania appeared some time before tennis. I first
collected ferns under a crag in a deep glen. Mere amassing soon gave
way to discrimination, which led to picking out a favorite fern. This
was chosen, I now realize, with a woeful lack of fine feeling. I
called it "The Alligator" from its fancied resemblance to my brother's
alligator-skin traveling-bag. But admiration of this fern brought a
dawning consciousness that certain natural objects were preferable to
others. This led, in years, to an enthusiasm for collecting
impressions of the beauty, strength, sympathy, and significance of
nature. The Alligator fern, as I still call it, has become a symbolic
thing to me; and the sight of it now stands for my supreme or
best-loved impression, not alone in the world of ferns,