I spent many tranquil hours in this retreat contemplating the tropical
mother-of-pearl shells, and trying to image to myself the strange coasts
from which they had come.

A good old great uncle of mine, who was very fond of me, encouraged me
in these diversions. He was a physician, and in his youth he had lived
for a long time upon the coast of Africa; he had a collection of natural
history specimens almost as valuable and varied as any found in a city
museum. His wonderful things captivated me: the rare and exquisite
shells, amulets and wooden weapons that still retained their exotic
odor, with which I became so surfeited later, and indescribably
beautiful butterflies under glass enchanted me.

He lived in our neighborhood and I visited him often. To get to his
cabinets, it was necessary to go through his garden where thorn-apples
and cacti grew abundantly, and where they kept a gray parrot, brought
from Gaboon, whose vocabulary consisted of words learnt from the
negroes.

And when my old uncle spoke of Senegal, of Goree, and of Guinea,
the music of these names intoxicated me, and conveyed to me vaguely
something of the sad languor of the dark continent. My uncle predicted
that I would become a great naturalist,--but he was as mistaken as were
all those others who foretold my future; indeed he struck farther from
the centre than any one else; he did not understand that my liking for
natural history was no more than a temporary and erratic excursion of
my unformed mind; he could not know that the cold glass and the formal,
rigid arrangements of dead science had not power to hold me for long.