sticking out at right angles, screaming with joy, for this transcended
any rocking-horse experiences. A hundred yards away there was a bend
in the road. Just at that point there was a manure-pile, which had
long bided its time. I had hold of a strand of the horse's mane; but
when he swerved at the bend I had to let go, and after a short flight
in air, the manure-pile received me in its soft embrace. Looking up
the road, I saw Mr. Tappan, with dilated eyes and a countenance
expressing keen emotion, coming towards me at a wonderful pace, and my
father and mother following him at a short distance. I did not myself
mind the smell of manure, and the others were glad to put up with it
in consideration of my having escaped broken bones.

We did not keep a dog, but Herman Melville, who often came over from
Pittsfield, had a large Newfoundland which he sometimes brought with,
him, and Mr. G. P. R. James, a novelist of the Walter Scott school,
had another, and I was permitted to bestride both of them; they were
safe enough, but they would turn back their heads and lay their cold
noses on my leg; I preferred the now-forbidden horse. But Melville
himself made up for everything by the tremendous stories he used to
tell about the South Sea Islands and the whale fishery. Normally he
was not a man of noticeable appearance; but when the narrative
inspiration was on him, he looked like all the things he was
describing--savages, sea-captains, the lovely Fayaway in her canoe, or
the terrible Moby Dick himself. There was vivid genius in this man,
and he was the strangest being that ever came into our circle. Through
all his wild and reckless adventures, of which a small part only got
into his fascinating books, he had been unable to rid himself of a
Puritan conscience; he afterwards tried to loosen its grip by studying
German metaphysics, but in vain. He was restless and disposed to dark
hours, and there is reason to suspect that there was in him a vein of