stories touched me; it seemed to me that you found yourself in the atmosphere of old Germany. Madame Perrault was more delicate; her fairy tales were pictures of no life that ever existed, and there was a great dissimilarity between her "Cendrillon" and the Grimms' story of "Aschenputtel." As I remember, the haughty sisters in the story of the beautiful girl who lived among the ashes each cut off one of her toes, in order to make her feet seem smaller and left bloody marks on the glass slipper. Madame Perrault's slipper was, I think, of white fur, and there was no such brutality in her fairyland. But, except Hans Christian Andersen's, there are no such gripping fairy tales as those of the Brethren Grimm. During this vacation, too, I discovered the "Leprachaun," the little Irish fairy with the hammer. He was not at all like the English fairies in Shake

speare's "Midsummer Night's Dream," and, leaving out Ariel, I think I liked him best of all.

That summer, too, I found an old copy of "Midsummer Night's Dream" in the attic. The print was exceedingly fine, but everything was there. No doubt there is much to be said by the pedagogues in favour of scrupulously studying Shakespeare's plays; but if you have never discovered "As You Like It" or "Midsummer Night's Dream" when you were very young, you will never know the meaning of that light which never was on land or sea, and with which Keats surrounds us in the "Ode to the Nightingale." The love interest did not count much. In my youthful experience everybody either married or died, in books. That was to be expected. It was the atmosphere that counted. One could see the troopers coming into the open space in the Forest of Arden and hear their songs, making the leaves of the trees quiver before they appeared. And Puck! and Caliban! When I was young I was always very sorry for Caliban, and, being very religious, I felt that the potent Prospero might have done something for his soul.

There was a boy who lived near us called

Lawrence Stockdale—peace be to his ashes where-ever he rests! His father and mother, who were persons of cultivation, encouraged him to read, but we were not of one opinion on any subject. He was devoted to Dumas, the Elder. After the episode of "Monte Cristo" I was led to believe that Dumas was "wrong." I preferred Sir Walter Scott, and loved all the Stuarts, having a positive devotion for Mary, Queen of Scots. One day, however, I discovered somewhere, under a pile of old geometries and books about navigation, a fat, red-bound copy of "Boccaccio." Stockdale said that "Boccaccio" was "wronger" than Dumas, and that his people had warned him against the stories of this Italian. As we lived near an Italian colony, and he disliked Italians, while I loved them, I attributed this to mere prejudice.

The "Boccaccio" was, as I have said, fat and large. For a boy who likes to read, a fat book is very tempting, and just as I had seated myself one afternoon on the front doorstep, to read the story of the Falcon, and having finished it with great pleasure, dipped into another tale not so edifying, my mother appeared. She turned pale with horror, and seized the book at once. My

father was informed of what had occurred. He was little alarmed, I think. My mother said: "We shall have to change the whole course of this boy's reading." "We shall have to change the boy first," my father said, with a sigh. But this was not the end. At the proper time I was led to the Pastor, who was my mother's confessor. The book was presented to him for destruction.

"It's a bad book," the Monsignore said. "I hope you didn't talk about any of these stories to the other boys in school?"

"Oh, no," I said; "if I did, they would say much worse things, and I would probably have to tell them in confession. Besides," I added, "all the people in the Boccaccio book were good Catholics, I suppose, as they were Italians, and I think, after all, when they caught the plague, they died good deaths."

The Pastor looked puzzled, took the book, and gave me his blessing and dismissed me. And my mother seemed to think that I was sufficiently exorcised.

After this the books I read were more carefully considered. I was given the "Tales of Canon

Schmidt"—dear little stories of German children in the Black Forest, with strange little wood-cuts, which went very well with another volume I found at this time called "Jack Halifax," not "John Halifax, Gentleman," which my mother had already read to me—but a curious little tome long out of print. And then there sailed upon my vision a long procession of the works of the Flemish novelist, Hendrik Conscience, whose "Lion of Flanders" opened a new world of romance, and there were "Wooden Clara," and other pieces which made one feel as if one lived in Flanders.

Just about this time I read in Littell's Living Age a novel called "The Amber Witch," and some of Fritz Reuter's Low German stories; but these were all effaced by "The Quaker Soldier." This may not have been much of a novel. I did not put it to the touch of comparison with "The Virginians" or "Esmond." They were what my father called "classics"—things superior and apart; but "The Quaker Soldier" was quite good enough for me. It opened a new view of American Revolutionary history, and then it was redolent of the country of Pennsylvania. I recall now the incident of the Pennsylvania Dutch housewife's using her thumb

to spread the butter on the bread for the hungry soldier. This is all that I can recall of those delectable pages. But, later, neither Henry Peterson's "Pemberton" nor Dr. Weir Mitchell's "Hugh Wynne" seemed to have the glory and the fascination of the long-lost "Quaker Soldier."

After this, I fell under the spell of the French Revolution through a book, given to me by my mother, about la Vendée. It was a dull book, but nothing, not even a bad translation, could dim the heroism of Henri de la Rochejaquelein for me, and I became a Royalist of the Royalists, and held hotly the thesis that if George Washington had returned the compliment of going over to France in '89, he would have done Lafayette a great service by restoring the good Louis XVI. and the beautiful Marie Antoinette!

When I had reached the age of seventeen I had developed, as the result of my reading, a great belief in all lost causes. I had become exceedingly devoted to the cause of Ireland as the kindly Pastor had sent me a copy of "Willy Reilly and His Colleen Bawn," perhaps as an antidote to the lingering effects of "Boccaccio." I was rather troubled to find so many "swear words" in it, but

I made all the allowances that a real lover of literature is often compelled to make!

The Bible

The glimpses I had of the Bible, some of which rather prejudiced me, as a moral child, against the Sacred Book, were, however, of inestimable value. Of course the New Testament was always open to me, and I read it constantly as a pleasure. The language, both in the Douai version and the King James version, was often very obscure. Although I soon learned to recognize the beauty of the 23rd Psalm in the King James version—which I always read when I went to one of my cousins—I found the sonorous Latinisms of the Douai version interesting. For a time I was limited to a book of Bible stories given us to read at school, as it was considered unwise to permit children to read the Old Testament unexpurgated. After a while, however, the embargo seemed to be raised for some reason or other, and again I was allowed to revel with a great deal of profit in the wonderful poems, prophecies, and