Rambling through a bookshop a few months ago I lighted on a copy of
Monte Christo and bought it greedily, for there was a railway journey
before me. It is a critical experiment to meet a love of early days
after the years have come and gone. This stout and very conventional
woman--the mother of thirteen children--could she have been the
black-eyed, slim girl to whom you and a dozen other lads lost their
hearts? On the whole, one would rather have cherished the former
portrait and not have seen the original in her last estate. It was
therefore with a flutter of delight that one found in this case the
old charm as fresh as ever--meaning, of course, the prison escape
with its amazing ingenuity and breathless interest.

When one had lost his bashfulness and could associate with grown-up
books, then he was admitted to the company of Scott, and Thackeray,
and Dickens, who were and are, as far as one can see, to be the
leaders of society. My fond recollection goes back to an evening in
the early sixties when a father read to his boy the first three
chapters of the Pickwick Papers from the green-coloured parts, and it
is a bitter regret that in some clearance of books that precious
Pickwick was allowed to go, as is supposed, with a lot of pamphlets
on Church and State, to the great gain of an unscrupulous dealer.

The editions of Scott are now innumerable, each more tempting than
the other; but affection turns back to the old red and white, in
forty-eight volumes, wherein one first fell under the magician's
spell. Thackeray, for some reason I cannot recall, unless it were a
prejudice in our home, I did not read in youth, but since then I have
never escaped from the fascination of Vanity Fair and The Newcomes,
and another about which I am to speak. What giants there were in the