suddenly, one day, as happens in
childhood with so many things, it vanished out of his possession as if
by magic. Perhaps he lost it; perhaps he lent it; at any rate it was
gone, and he never got it back, and he never knew what book it was till
thirty years afterward, when he picked up from a friend's library-table
a copy of _Gesta Romanorum_, and recognized in this collection of old
monkish legends the long-missing treasure of his boyhood.

These stories, without beauty of invention, without art of construction
or character, without spirituality in their crude materialization, which
were read aloud in the refectories of mediaeval cloisters while the monks
sat at meat, laid a spell upon the soul of the boy that governed his
life. He conformed his conduct to the principles and maxims which
actuated the behavior of the shadowy people of these dry-as-dust tales;
he went about drunk with the fumes of fables about Roman emperors that
never were, in an empire that never was; and, though they tormented him
by putting a mixed and impossible civilization in the place of that he
knew from his Goldsmith, he was quite helpless to break from their
influence. He was always expecting some wonderful thing to happen to him
as things happened there in fulfilment of some saying or prophecy; and
at every trivial moment he made sayings and prophecies for himself,
which he wished events to fulfil. One Sunday when he was walking in an
alley behind one of the stores, he found a fur cap that had probably
fallen out of the store-loft window. He ran home with it, and in his
simple-hearted rapture he told his mother that as soon as he picked it
up there came into his mind the words, "He who picketh up this cap
picketh up a fortune," and he could hardly wait for Monday to come and
let him restore the cap to its owner and receive an enduring prosperity
in reward of his virtue. Heaven knows what form he expected this to
take; but when he found himself in the store, he lost all courage; his
tongue clove to the roof of his mouth, and he could not utter a syllable
of the fine phrases he had made to himself. He laid the cap on the
counter without a word; the storekeeper came up and took it in his hand.
"What's this?" he said. "Why, this is ours," and he tossed the cap into
a loose pile of hats by the showcase, and the boy slunk out, cut to the
heart and crushed to the dust. It was such a cruel disappointment and
mortification that it was rather a relief t