of his
own capacity for action, it seemed a pity that he could not follow the
drum and the flag into such contests as he read about so eagerly.

And yet this was only a corner of the boy's imagination. He had many
worlds and he lived in each by turn. There was the world of the Old
Testament, of David and Samson, and of those dim figures in the dawn of
history, called the Patriarchs. There was the world of Julius Caesar and
the Latin grammar, though this was scarcely as real to him as the Old
Testament, which was brought to his notice every Sunday as a necessity
of his life, while Caesar and AEneas and the fourth declension were made
to be a task, for some mysterious reason, a part of his education. He
had not been told that they were really a part of the other world which
occupied his mind so much of the time, the world of the Arabian Nights
and Robinson Crusoe, and Coleridge and Shelley and Longfellow, and
Washington Irving and Scott and Thackeray, and Pope's Iliad and
Plutarch's Lives. That this was a living world to the boy was scarcely
his fault, for it must be confessed that those were very antiquated
book-shelves in the old farmhouse to which he had access, and the news
had not been apprehended in this remote valley that the classics of
literature were all as good as dead and buried, and that the human mind
had not really created anything worth modern notice before about the
middle of the nineteenth century. It was not exactly an ignorant valley,
for the daily newspapers were there, and the monthly magazine, and the
fashion-plate of Paris, and the illuminating sunshine of new science,
and enough of the uneasy throb of modern life. Yet somehow the books
that were still books had not been sent to the garret, to make room for
the illustrated papers and the profound physiological studies of sin and
suffering that were produced by touching a scientific button. No, the
boy was conscious in a way of the mighty pulsation of American life,
and he had also a dim notion that his dreams in his various worlds would
come to a brilliant fulfillment when he was big enough to go out and win
a name and fame. But somehow the old books, and the family life, and the
sedate ways of the community he knew, had given him a fundamental and
not unarmed faith in the things that were and had been.

Every Sunday the preacher denounced the glitter and frivolity and
corruption of what he called Society, until the boy longed to see this
splendid