The words, if the book be eloquent, should run
thenceforward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and the story, if
it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye.
It was for this last pleasure that we read so closely, and loved our
books so dearly, in the bright, troubled period of boyhood. Eloquence
and thought, character and conversation, were but obstacles to brush
aside as we dug blithely after a certain sort of incident, like a pig
for truffles. For my part, I liked a story to begin with an old wayside
inn where, "towards the close of the year 17----," several gentlemen in
three-cocked hats were playing bowls. A friend of mine preferred the
Malabar coast in a storm, with a ship beating to windward, and a
scowling fellow of Herculean proportions striding along the beach; he,
to be sure, was a pirate. This was further afield than my home-keeping
fancy loved to travel, and designed altogether for a larger canvas than
the tales that I affected. Give me a highwayman and I was full to the
brim; a Jacobite would do, but the highwayman was my favourite dish. I
can still hear that merry clatter of the hoofs along the moonlit lane;
night and the coming of day are still related in my mind with the doings
of John Rann or Jerry Abershaw; and the words "post-chaise," the "great
North Road," "ostler," and "nag" still sound in my ears like poetry. One
and all, at least, and each with his particular fancy, we read
story-books in childhood, not for eloquence or character or thought, but
for some quality of the brute incident. That quality was not mere
bloodshed or wonder. Although each of these was welcome in its place,
the charm for the sake of which we read depended on something different
from either. My elders used to read novels aloud; and I can still
remember four different passages which I heard, before I was ten, with
the same keen and lasting pleasure. One I discovered long afterwards to
be the admirable opening of "What will He Do with It": it was no wonder
that I was pleased with that. The other three still remain unidentified.
One is a little vague; it was about a dark, tall house at night, and
people groping on the stairs by the light that escaped from the open
door of a sickroom. In another, a lover left a ball, and went walking in
a cool, dewy park, whence he could watch the lighted windows and the
figures of the dancers as they moved. This was the most sentimental
impression I think I had ye