.
Probably the boy liked him better because the Arab was more picturesque
than the Englishman. The whole narrative was very interesting; it had a
vein of sincere and earnest piety in it which was not its least charm,
and it was written in a style of old-fashioned stateliness which was not
without its effect with the boys.

Somehow they did not think of the Arabs in this narrative as of the same
race and faith with the Arabs of Bagdad and the other places in the
"Arabian Nights." They did not think whether these were Mohammedans or
not; they naturalized them in the fairy world where all boys are
citizens, and lived with them there upon the same familiar terms as they
lived with Robinson Crusoe. Their father once told them that Robinson
Crusoe had robbed the real narrative of Alexander Selkirk of the place
it ought to have held in the remembrance of the world; and my boy had a
feeling of guilt in reading it, as if he were making himself the
accomplice of an impostor. He liked the "Arabian Nights," but oddly
enough these wonderful tales made no such impression on his fancy as the
stories in a wretchedly inferior book made. He did not know the name of
this book, or who wrote it; from which I imagine that much of his
reading was of the purblind sort that ignorant grown-up people do,
without any sort of literary vision. He read this book perpetually, when
he was not reading his "Greek and Roman Mythology;" and then 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 afterwards, 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 mi