his life, while Caesar and AEneas and the fourth declension were made to
be a task, for some mysterious reason, a part of his education. He had
not been told that they were really a part of the other world which
occupied his mind so much of the time, the world of the Arabian Nights
and Robinson Crusoe, and Coleridge and Shelley and Longfellow, and
Washington Irving and Scott and Thackeray, and Pope's Iliad and
Plutarch's Lives. That this was a living world to the boy was scarcely
his fault, for it must be confessed that those were very antiquated
book-shelves in the old farmhouse to which he had access, and the news
had not been apprehended in this remote valley that the classics of
literature were all as good as dead and buried, and that the human mind
had not really created anything worth modern notice before about the
middle of the nineteenth century. It was not exactly an ignorant valley,
for the daily newspapers were there, and the monthly magazine, and the
fashion-plate of Paris, and the illuminating sunshine of new science, and
enough of the uneasy throb of modern life. Yet somehow the books that
were still books had not been sent to the garret, to make room for the
illustrated papers and the profound physiological studies of sin and
suffering that were produced by touching a scientific button. No, the boy
was conscious in a way of the mighty pulsation of American life, and he
had also a dim notion that his dreams in his various worlds would come to
a brilliant fulfillment when he was big enough to go out and win a name
and fame. But somehow the old books, and the family life, and the sedate
ways of the community he knew, had given him a fundamental and not
unarmed faith in the things that were and had been.

Every Sunday the preacher denounced the glitter and frivolity and
corruption of what he called Society, until the boy longed to see this
splendid panorama of cities and hasting populations, the seekers of
pleasure and money and fame, this gay world which was as fascinating as