rippling river, under wild rocks, and
so steeped my soul in the supernatural, that I seemed to live a double
life. As was natural, my schoolmates read and liked such tales, but they
sunk into my very soul, and took root, and grew up into a great
overshadowing forest, while with others they were only as dwarf bushes,
if they grew at all. All of this--though I did not know it--was
unconsciously educating my bewitched mind to a deep and very precocious
passion for mediaeval and black-letter literature and occult philosophy,
which was destined to manifest itself within a few years.

There was another book which greatly influenced my mind and life. I have
forgotten the title, but it was a very remarkable collection of
curiosities, such as accounts of a family of seven children who had every
one some strange peculiarity, dwarfs and giants, and mysteriously-gifted
mortals, and all kinds of odd beings and inventions. I obtained in a
very mysterious way; for one day I found it in my desk, a blessed gift
indeed from some unknown friend who had rightly judged of my tastes. This
work I literally lived upon for a long time. Once a lady friend of my
mother's came in winter and took me a-sleighing, but I had my dear book
under my jacket, and contrived now and then to re-read some anecdote in
it. In after years I found a copy of it in the Mercantile Library,
Philadelphia, but I have never seen it elsewhere. {56} I had at Mr.
Alcott's carefully studied all the Percy Anecdotes, and could repeat most
of them when recalled by some association; also Goldsmith's "Animated
Nature," the perusal of which latter work was to me as the waving of a
forest and the sighing of deep waters. Then, too, I had read--in fact I
owned--the famous Peter Parley books, which gave me, as they have to
thousands of boys, a desire to travel and see the world. I marvelled
greatly at finding that Peter Parley himself, or Mr. S. G. Goodrich, had
a beautiful country-house very near our school, and his son Frank, who
was a very pleasant and wonderfully polite and sunshiny boy, sat by me in
school. Frank Goodrich in after life wrote a novel entitled "Flirtation
and its Consequences," of which my brother said, "What are its
consequences, Frank; good rich husbands? By no means." I can remember
being invited to a perfectly heavenly garden-party at the Goodrichs', and
evening visits there with my mother. And I may note by the way, that
Frank himself lived abroa