cotton bags,--Miss Roquil's school (I never found
out that the name was Rockwell until ten years afterwards,--so phonetic
is nature!) in Parade Street, where the huge, cunning Anakim of the
first class used to cajole me, poor little man, always foolishly
benevolent, into bestowing upon them all the gingerbread of my lunch,
which I gave, and found a dim, vague sense of incorrectness remaining in
my childish mind. They must have been boys of fourteen or fifteen; but I
remember them as of giantly stature and vast age.

A grisly being haunted the neighborhood through which I had afterwards
to pass to another school,--a great, hulking, brutal fellow, Tom
Reddiford by name, from whom I apprehended unimaginable tortures. I
crept back and forth in such dumb, nameless frights as frontier children
may have felt, who, in old times of Indian war, passed through woods
where the red hand of a Wyandot might grasp them out of any bush. I have
not the least idea why this wretched Reddiford used to hunt me so, as
when one doth hunt a partridge in the mountains, unless out of pure
beastly enjoyment of my childish frights. He did, once or twice, hustle
me about, I believe, but never inflicted actual bodily harm. I told my
parents; but they helped me not at all. Either they thought I was not
really scared, or that the experience would do me good; but it was a
mistake. My father should have searched out this young bully and
effectually quieted him. Fright is a most beneficial thing for bullies,
but a sadly harmful one for a little boy. How fervently I vowed to
"lick" that Tom Reddiford, if I ever grew half as big as he! Very likely
he has died in a brawl or a poor-house by this time. But his outrages
burnt into my mind scars so deep that they are part of its structure. I
will pay him off yet, if I meet him.

Another awful figure haunted the same neighborhood,--"Old Britt," a
street sot,--an old, filthy, unshorn hog of a man, moving in a halo of
rags and effluvium,--whom I used to meet lurching along the pavement, or
sometimes prone by the roadside in a nauseous rummy sleep. Him I passed
by with a wide circuit of fear and disgust and detestation.

My local attachments must have been stunted, like the roots of plants
often transplanted. They twine close and strong about no place. How
could they, when in my native city alone--not to mention the six other
towns where I have sojourned, four of whose names begin with the
syllable "New"--I can co