nce with these authors certain
Boeotian years, when if I did not go backward I scarcely went forward in
the paths I had set out upon. They were years of the work, of the
over-work, indeed, which falls to the lot of so many that I should be
ashamed to speak of it except in accounting for the fact. My father had
sold his paper in Hamilton and had bought an interest in another at
Dayton, and we were all straining our utmost to help pay for it. My daily
tasks began so early and ended so late that I had little time, even if I
had the spirit, for reading; and it was not till what we thought ruin,
but what was really release, came to us that I got back again to my
books. Then we went to live in the country for a year, and that stress of
toil, with the shadow of failure darkening all, fell from me like the
horror of an evil dream. The only new book which I remember to have read
in those two or three years at Dayton, when I hardly remember to have
read any old ones, was the novel of 'Jane Eyre,' which I took in very
imperfectly, and which I associate with the first rumor of the Rochester
Knockings, then just beginning to reverberate through a world that they
have not since left wholly at peace. It was a gloomy Sunday afternoon
when the book came under my hand; and mixed with my interest in the story
was an anxiety lest the pictures on the walls should leave their nails
and come and lay themselves at my feet; that was what the pictures had
been doing in Rochester and other places where the disembodied spirits
were beginning to make themselves felt. The thing did not really happen
in my case, but I was alone in the house, and it might very easily have
happened.

If very little came to me in those days from books, on the other hand my
acquaintance with the drama vastly enlarged itself. There was a hapless
company of players in the town from time to time, and they came to us for
their printing. I believe they never paid for it, or at least never
wholly, but they lavished free passes upon us, and as nearly as I can
make out, at this distance of time, I profited by their generosity, every
night. They gave two or three plays at every performance to houses
ungratefully small, but of a lively spirit and impatient temper that
would not brook delay in the representation; and they changed the bill
each day. In this way I became familiar with Shakespeare before I read
him, or at least such plays of his as were most given in those days, and
I