ild, and was very highly praised for getting the best
out of a good book until I broke a tooth in trying to undo a very tough
knot.

It was a far cry from the respectable Miss Edgeworth to a series of
Beadle's "Dime Novels." I looked on them as delectable but inferior.
There was a prejudice against them in well-brought-up households; but
if you thoughtfully provided yourself with a brown paper cover, which
concealed the flaring yellow of Beadle's front page, you were very
likely to escape criticism. I never finished "Osceola, the Seminole,"
because my aunt looked over my shoulder and read a rapturous account of
a real fight, in which somebody kicked somebody else violently in the
abdomen. My aunt reported to my mother that the book was very
"indelicate" and after that Beadle's "Dime Novels" were absolutely
forbidden. At school, we were told that any boy who read Beadle's was a
moral leper; but as most of us concluded that leper had something to do
with leaper, the effect was not very convincing.

Perhaps I might have been decoyed back to Beadle's, for all the
youngsters knew that there was nothing really wrong in them, but I
happened to remember the scene in Sir Walter Scott's "Abbot," where
Edward Glendenning wades into the sea to prevent Mary Stuart from
leaving Scotland. I hied me to "The Monastery" and devoured everything
of Sir Walter's except "Saint Ronan's Well." That never seemed worthy of
the great Sir Walter. "The Black Dwarf" and "Anne of Geierstein" were
rather tough reading, and "Count Robert of Paris" might have been
written by Lord Bacon, if Lord Bacon had been a contemporary of Sir
Walter's. "Peveril of the Peak" and "Ivanhoe" and "Bride of Lammermoor"
again and again dazzled and consoled me until I discovered "Nicholas
Nickleby."

"Nicholas Nickleby" took entire possession of me. In the rainy winter
afternoons, when nothing could occur out of doors which a respectable
city boy was permitted to indulge in, I found that I was expected to
work. Boys worked hard at their lessons in those days. There was a
kitchen downstairs with a Dutch oven not used in the winter. There it
was easy to build a small fire and to toast bread and to read "Nicholas
Nickleby" after one had rushed through the required tasks, which
generally included ten pages of the "Historia Sacra" in Latin. If you
never read "Nicholas Nickleby" when you were young, you cannot possibly
know the flavour of Dickens. You can't laugh now as you l