paper-bound quarto, in large and most legible type, on certain pages of
which the tender hand that was the shield of my infancy had crossed out
with deep black marks something awful, probably about BEARS, such as once
tare two-and-forty of us little folks for making faces, and the very name
of which made us hide our heads under the bedclothes.

I made strange acquaintances in that book infirmary up in the southeast
attic. The "Negro Plot" at New York helped to implant a feeling in me
which it took Mr. Garrison a good many years to root out. "Thinks I to
Myself," an old novel, which has been attributed to a famous statesman,
introduced me to a world of fiction which was not represented on the
shelves of the library proper, unless perhaps by Coelebs in Search of a
Wife, or allegories of the bitter tonic class, as the young doctor that
sits on the other side of the table would probably call them. I always,
from an early age, had a keen eye for a story with a moral sticking out
of it, and gave it a wide berth, though in my later years I have myself
written a couple of "medicated novels," as one of my dearest and
pleasantest old friends wickedly called them, when somebody asked her if
she had read the last of my printed performances. I forgave the satire
for the charming esprit of the epithet. Besides the works I have
mentioned, there was an old, old Latin alchemy book, with the manuscript
annotations of some ancient Rosicrucian, in the pages of which I had a
vague notion that I might find the mighty secret of the Lapis
Philosophorum, otherwise called Chaos, the Dragon, the Green Lion, the
Quinta Essentia, the Soap of Sages, the Vinegar of Philosophers, the Dew
of Heavenly Grace, the Egg, the Old Man, the Sun, the Moon, and by all
manner of odd aliases, as I am assured by the plethoric little book
before me, in parchment covers browned like a meerschaum with the smoke
of furnaces and the thumbing of dead gold seekers, and the fingering of
bony-handed book-misers, and the long intervals of dusty slumber on the