the organ, and read Benvenuto Cellini's account of
the sorcerer in the Colosseum in Rome: I shall see his Perseus ten
minutes hence in the Signoria of Florence, where I now write.

Then there were the quiet summer evenings in the drawing-room, where my
cousins played the piano and sang "The Sunset Tree," "Alknoomuk," "I see
them on the winding way," and Moore's melodies. _Tempi passati_--"'Tis
sixty year's since." Caroline meantime married a Mr. Wight, who had
passed most of his life in England, and was thoroughly Anglicised. There
was also an English lady visiting America who stayed a while in Dedham to
be with my cousin. She was _jeune encore_, but had with her a young
English gentleman relative who _would_ call her "Mamma!" which we thought
rather _niais_. From my reading and my few experiences I, however,
acquired a far greater insight into life than most boys would have done,
for I remembered and thought long over everything I heard or learned.
Between my mother and cousins and our visitors there was much reading and
discussion of literary topics, and I listened to more than any one noted,
and profited by it.

I was always reading and mentally reviewing. If my mother made a call, I
was at once absorbed in the first book which came to hand. Thus I can
remember that one summer, when we came to Dr. Stimson's, during the brief
interval of our being shown into the "parlour," I seized on a Unitarian
literary magazine and read the story of Osapho, the Egyptian who trained
parrots to cry, "Osapho is a god!" Also an article on Chinese
acupuncture with needles to cure rheumatism; which chance readings and
reminiscences I could multiply _ad infinitum_.

My cousin Caroline, whom I remember as very beautiful and refined, with a
_distinguee_ manner, had a small work-box, on the cover of which was a
picture of the Pavilion in Brighton. She spoke of the building as a
rubbishy piece of architecture; but I, who felt it through the "Arabian
Nights," admired it, and pitied her want of taste. _Now_ I have lived
altogether three years in Brighton, but I never saw the Pavilion without
recalling the little yellow work-box. In some mysterious way the picture
seems to me to be grander than the original. Dickens has expressed this
idea. I was too grave and earnest as a child to be called a cheerful or
happy one, which was partly due to much ill-health; yet, by a strange
contradiction not uncommon in America, I was gifted with