a mountain or paddling a canoe, and spending hours in a
library. I would have liked also to hunt grizzly bears and to fight
Indians,--but these were purely Platonic passions, detached from
physical experience. I never realized them in hot blood.

"My native preferences were trimmed and pruned by the fortune that
fixed my abode, during nine months of every year, in the city of
Brooklyn, where there were no mountains to climb, no rivers to canoe,
and no bears to hunt. The winter of my discontent, however, was
somewhat cheered by games of football and baseball in the vacant lots
on the heights above Wall Street Ferry, and by fierce battles and
single combats with the tribes of 'Micks' who inhabited the regions of
Furman Street and Atlantic Avenue. There was no High Court of
Arbitration to suggest a peaceful solution of the difficulties out of
which these conflicts arose. In fact, so far as I can remember, there
was seldom a _casus belli_ which could be defined and discussed. The
warfare simply effervesced, like gas from a mineral spring. It was
chronic, geographical, temperamental, and its everlasting continuance
was suggested in the threat with which the combatants usually parted:
'wait till we ketch you alone, down our street!'

"There was also a school which claimed some hours of my attention on
five days of the week. On holidays my father used to take me on the
most delightful fishing excursions to the then unpolluted waters of
Coney Island Creek and Sheepshead Bay; and on Monday afternoons in
midwinter it was a regular thing that I should go with him to New York
to ramble among the old book-shops in Nassau Street and eat oysters at
Dorlon's stall, with wooden tables and sawdust-sprinkled floor, in
Fulton Market. Say what you please about the friendship of books: it
was worth a thousand times more to have the friendship of such a
father.

"But there was still a good deal of unoccupied time on my hands between
the first of October and the first of May, and having learned to read
(in the old-fashioned way, by wrestling with the alphabet and plain
spelling), at the age of about five years, I was willing enough to give
some of my juvenile leisure to books and try to find out what they had
to say about various things which interested me. I did not go to school
until my tenth year, and so there was quite a long period left free for
general reading, beginning with the delightful old-fashioned books of
fairy tales without