possession of the small house my father had owned in the country before
our removal to the city, and to be provided for.

My uncle placed me in a mercantile house to learn business, and, after
exercising some slight supervision over me a few months, left me
entirely to my own resources. As, however, he had previously taken care
that these resources should be sufficient, I got along very well upon
them, was regularly promoted, and in the space of six years, at the age
of twenty-one, was in a rather responsible situation in the house, with
a good salary. But my whole attention could not be absorbed in the dull
routine of business, my most precious hours were devoted to reading, in
which I still pursued my old childish track of speculation, with the
difference that I exchanged Sinbad's valley of diamonds for Arabia
Petraea, Sir John Mandeville for Herodotus, and Robinson Crusoe for
Belzoni and Burckhardt Whether my interest in these Oriental studies
arose from the fact of the house being concerned in the importation of
the products of the Indies, or whether from the secret attraction that
had drawn me Eastward since my earliest childhood, as if the Arab
doctor had bewitched in curing me, I cannot say; probably it was the
former, especially as the India business became gradually more and more
intrusted to my hands.

Shortly after my twenty-first birthday, I received a note from my
uncle, from whom I had not heard for a year, or two, informing me that
my father's house, which he had kept rented for me during the first
years of my minority, had been without a tenant for a year, and, as I
had now come of age, I had better go down to D---- and take possession
of it. This letter, touching upon a long train of associations and
recollections, awoke an intense longing in me to revisit the home of my
childhood, and meet those phantom shapes that had woven that spell in