at she never
read children's books. Nothing was ever adapted to my youthful
misunderstanding. She read aloud what she liked to read, and she never
considered whether I liked it or not. It was a method of discipline. At
first, I looked drearily out at the soggy city street, in which rivulets
of melted snow made any exercise, suitable to my age, impossible. There
is nothing so hopeless for a child as an afternoon in a city when the
heavy snows begin to melt. My mother, however, was altogether regardless
of what happened outside of the house. At two o'clock precisely--after
the manner of the King in William Morris's "Earthly Paradise"--she waved
her wand. After that, all that I was expected to do was to make no
noise.

In this way I became acquainted with "The Virginians," then running in
_Harper's Magazine_, with "Adam Bede" and "As You Like It" and "Richard
III." and "Oliver Twist" and "Nicholas Nickleby" and "Valentine
Vox"--why "Valentine Vox?"--and other volumes when I should have been
listening to "Alice in Wonderland." But when I came, in turn, to "Alice
in Wonderland," I found Alice's rather dull in comparison with the
adventures of the Warrington brothers. And Thackeray's picture of Gumbo
carrying in the soup tureen! To have listened to Rebecca's description
of the great fight in "Ivanhoe," to have lived through the tournament of
Ashby de la Zouche, was a poor preparation for the vagaries of the queer
creatures that surrounded the inimitable Alice.

There appeared to be no children's books in the library to which we had
access. It never seemed to me that "Robinson Crusoe" or "Gulliver's
Travels" or "Swiss Family Robinson" were children's books; they were not
so treated by my mother, and I remember, as a small boy, going up to
Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, with divine eagerness, to buy the
latest number of a Dickens serial. I think the name of the shop--the
shop of Paradise--which sold these books was called Ashburnham's. It may
be asked how the episode in "Adam Bede" of Hetty and that of "little
Em'ly" in Dickens struck the child mind. As I remember, the child mind
was awed and impressed, by a sense of horror, probably occasioned as
much by the force of the style, by the suggestions of an unknown terror,
as by any facts which a child could grasp.

It was a curious thing that my mother, who had remarkably good taste in
literature, admired Mrs. Henry Wood extravagantly. She also admired
Queen Victoria. She nev