II.

I must have been about twelve years of age when I realized that I was
possessed of the bard's inheritance. A momentous journey I made with my
parents to Boston about this time not only stimulated this gift, but gave
me the advantage of which other travellers before me have likewise
availed themselves--of being able to take certain poetic liberties with a
distant land that my friends at home had never seen. Often during the
heat of summer noons when we were assembled under the big maple beside
the lattice fence in the Peters' yard, the spirit would move me to relate
the most amazing of adventures. Our train, for instance, had been held up
in the night by a band of robbers in black masks, and rescued by a
traveller who bore a striking resemblance to my Cousin Robert Breck. He
had shot two of the robbers. These fabrications, once started, flowed
from me with ridiculous ease. I experienced an unwonted exhilaration,
exaltation; I began to believe that they had actually occurred. In vain
the astute Julia asserted that there were no train robbers in the east.
What had my father done? Well, he had been very brave, but he had had no
pistol. Had I been frightened? No, not at all; I, too, had wished for a
pistol. Why hadn't I spoken of this before? Well, so many things had
happened to me I couldn't tell them all at once. It was plain that Julia,
though often fascinated against her will, deemed this sort of thing
distinctly immoral.

I was a boy divided in two. One part of me dwelt in a fanciful realm of
his own weaving, and the other part was a commonplace and protesting
inhabitant of a world of lessons, disappointments and discipline. My
instincts were not vicious. Ideas bubbled up within me continually from
an apparently inexhaustible spring, and the very strength of the longings