e plays, to pour them out,
tragedy upon tragedy, till the world was filled with tears and blood.
Perhaps it was because his soul was so soaked, and, as it were,
water-logged with the drama, that it could only drift sluggishly in that
welter of emotions, and make for no point, no port, where it could
recover itself and direct its powers again. The historical romance which
he had begun to write before the impassioned days of the theatre seems
to have been lost sight of at this time, though it was an enterprise
that he was so confident of carrying forward that he told all his family
and friends about it, and even put down the opening passages of it on
paper which he cut in large quantity, and ruled himself, so as to have
it exactly suitable. The story, as I have said, was imagined from events
in Irving's history of the "Conquest of Granada," a book which the boy
loved hardly less than the monkish legends of "Gesta Romanorum," and it
concerned the rival fortunes of Hamet el Zegri and Boabdil el Chico, the
uncle and nephew who vied with each other for the crumbling throne of
the Moorish kingdom; but I have not the least notion how it all ended.
Perhaps the boy himself had none.

I wish I could truly say that he finished any of his literary
undertakings, but I cannot. They were so many that they cumbered the
house, and were trodden under foot; and sometimes they brought him to
open shame, as when his brother picked one of them up, and began to read
it out loud with affected admiration. He was apt to be ashamed of his
literary efforts after the first moment, and he shuddered at his
brother's burlesque of the high romantic vein in which most of his
neverended beginnings were conceived. One of his river-faring uncles was
visiting with his family at the boy's home when he laid out the scheme
of his great fiction of "Hamet el Zegri," and the kindly young aunt took
an interest in it which he poorly rewarded a few months later, when she
asked how the story was getting on, and he tried to ignore the whole
matter, and showed such mortification at the mention of it that the poor
lady was quite bewildered.

The trouble with him was, that he had to live that kind of double life I
have spoken of--the Boy's Town life and the Cloud Dweller's life--and
that the last, which he was secretly proud of, abashed him before the
first. This is always the way with double-lived people, but he did not
know it, and he stumbled along through the glory a