those experts in psychology who are always seeking questions
sometime ago wrote to me demanding if "Plutarch's Lives" had influenced
me, and whether I thought they were good reading for the young. Our
"Plutarch" was rather appalling to look at. It was bound in mottled
cardboard, and the pages had red edges; but I attacked it one day, when
I was about ten years of age, and became enthralled. It was "actual." My
mother was a veteran politician, and read a daily paper, with Southern
tendencies called the _Age_; my father belonged to the opposite party,
and admired Senator Hoar as greatly as my mother admired the famous
Vallandigham. Between the two, I had formed a very poor opinion of
American statesmen in general; but the statesmen in "Plutarch" were of a
very different type.

Julius Caesar interested me; but Brutus filled me with exaltation. I had
not then read Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar." It seemed to me that Brutus
was a model for all time. Now, understand I was a good Christian child,
and I said my prayers every night and morning, but this did not prevent
me from hating the big bully of the school, who made the lives of the
ten or fifteen small boys a perpetual torment. How we suffered, no
adult human tongue can tell--and our tongues never told because it was a
convention that tales should not be told out of school. One of the
pleasant tricks of the bully and his friends was to chase the little
boys after school in the winter and bury them until they were almost
suffocated in the snow which was piled up in the narrow streets. It was
not only suffocating snow, but it was dirty snow. It happened that I had
been presented with a penknife consisting of two rather leaden blades
covered with a brilliant iridescent mother-of-pearl handle. The bully
wanted this knife, and I knew it. Generally, I left it at home; but it
occurred to me on one inspired morning, after I had read "Plutarch" the
night before, that I would display the knife open in my pocket, and when
he threw the full weight of his body upon me, I would kill him at once,
by an upward thrust of the knife.

This struck me as a good deed entirely worthy of Brutus. Of course, I
knew that I should be hanged, but then I expected the glory of making a
last dying speech, and, besides, the school would have a holiday. On the
morning preceding the great sacrifice, I gave out dark hints to the
small boys, distributed my various belongings to friends who were about
to be be