have tried to read again the Mayne Reid books which I so dearly loved as
a boy, only to find, alas! that it is impossible. But I really believe
that I enjoy going over _Our Young Folks_ now nearly as much as ever.
"Cast Away in the Cold," "Grandfather's Struggle for a Homestead," "The
William Henry Letters," and a dozen others like them were first-class,
good healthy stories, interesting in the first place, and in the next
place teaching manliness, decency, and good conduct. At the cost of
being deemed effeminate, I will add that I greatly liked the girls'
stories--"Pussy Willow" and "A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's
Life," just as I worshiped "Little Men" and "Little Women" and "An
Old-Fashioned Girl."

This enjoyment of the gentler side of life did not prevent my reveling
in such tales of adventure as Ballantyne's stories, or Marryat's
"Midshipman Easy." I suppose everybody has kinks in him, and even as
a child there were books which I ought to have liked and did not. For
instance, I never cared at all for the first part of "Robinson Crusoe"
(and although it is unquestionably the best part, I do not care for it
now); whereas the second part, containing the adventures of Robinson
Crusoe, with the wolves in the Pyrenees, and out in the Far East, simply
fascinated me. What I did like in the first part were the adventures
before Crusoe finally reached his island, the fight with the Sallee
Rover, and the allusion to the strange beasts at night taking their
improbable bath in the ocean. Thanks to being already an embryo
zoologist, I disliked the "Swiss Family Robinson" because of the wholly
impossible collection of animals met by that worthy family as they
ambled inland from the wreck. Even in poetry it was the relation of
adventures that most appealed to me as a boy. At a pretty early age I
began to read certain books of poetry, notably Longfellow's poem,
"The Saga of King Olaf," which absorbed me. This introduced me to