During all this time my museum made great progress, and it soon became
necessary for me to have some new shelves put up.

My great uncle continued to take a very deep interest in my taste for
natural history, and among his shells he found a number of duplicates,
and these he presented to me. With indefatigable patience he taught me
the scientific classifications of Cuvier, Linne, Lamarck or Bruguieres,
and I was astonished at the attention with which I listened to him.

In a very old little desk, that was a part of the furniture of my
museum, I had a copy-book into which I copied, from uncle's notes, and
numbered with the greatest care, the name of the species, genus, family
and class of each shell,--also the place of its origin. And there by the
dim light that fell upon the desk, in the silence of that little retreat
so high above the street, surrounded with objects what had come from
distant corners of the earth and from the depths of the sea, when
my mind wandered, and I became fatigued because of the mysterious
differences in the forms of animals, and because of the infinite variety
of shells, with what emotion I wrote down in my book, opposite the name
of a Spirifer or a Terebratula, such enchanting words as these: "Eastern
coast of Africa," "coast of Guinea," "Indian Ocean."

I recall that in this same museum I experienced, one afternoon in March,
a peculiar feeling indicative of my tendency towards reaction, that
later, at certain periods of self-abandonment, caused me to seek the
rough and uncouth society of sailors, and made me revel in noise and
change and gayety.