When we declaimed certain scenes in an upper chamber with sloping
walls and dormer windows, a bed for a throne, a cotton umbrella for a
sceptre, our creations were harmless enough. If I remember rightly,
our nine-year-old Lady Macbeths and Iagos, Falstaffs and Cleopatras,
after they had been dipped in the divine alembic of childish
innocence, came out so respectable that they would not have brought
the historic "blush to the cheek of youth."

On the shelf above the Shakespeare were a few things presumably better
suited to childish tastes,--Hawthorne's "Wonder Book," Kingsley's
"Water Babies," Miss Edgeworth's "Rosamond," and the "Arabian Nights."

There were also two little tales given us by a wandering revivalist,
who was on a starring tour through the New England villages,
"How Gussie Grew in Grace," and "Little Harriet's Work for the
Heathen,"--melodramatic histories of spiritually perfect and
physically feeble children who blessed the world for a season, but
died young, enlivened by a few pages devoted to completely vicious and
adorable ones who lived to curse the world to a good old age.

Last of all, brought out only on state occasions, was a most seductive
edition of that nursery Gaboriau, "Who Killed Cock Robin?" with
colored illustrations in which the heads of the birds were made to
move oracularly, by means of cunningly arranged strips pulled from
the bottom of the page. This was a relic of infancy, our first
introduction to the literature of plot, counterplot, intrigue, and
crime, and the mystery of the murder was very real to us. This book,
still in existence, with all the birds headless from over-exertion,
is always inextricably associated in my mind with childish woes, as
a desire on my part to make the birds wag their heads was always
contemporaneous, to a second, with a like desire on my sister's part;
and on those rare days when the precious volume was taken down, one of
us always donned the penitential nightgown early in the afternoon and
supped frugally in bed, while the other feasted gloriously at the
family board, never quite happy in her virtue, however, since it
separated her from beloved vice in disgrace. That paltry tattered
volume, when it confronts me from its safe nook in a bureau drawer,
makes my heart beat faster and sets me dreaming! Pray tell me if any
book read in your later and wiser years ever brings to your mind such
vivid memories, to your lips so lingering a smile, to your eye so