I was afraid of ships.  Why, I could never tell.  The masts looked frightfully tall,—­but they were not so tall as the steeple of our old yellow meeting-house.  At any rate, I used to hide my eyes from the sloops and schooners that were wont to lie at the end of the bridge, and I confess that traces of this undefined terror lasted very long.—­One other source of alarm had a still more fearful significance.  There was a great wooden HAND,—­a glove-maker’s sign, which used to swing and creak in the blast, as it hung from a pillar before a certain shop a mile or two outside of the city.  Oh, the dreadful hand!  Always hanging there ready to catch up a little boy, who would come home to supper no more, nor yet to bed,—­whose porringer would be laid away empty thenceforth, and his half-worn shoes wait until his small brother grew to fit them.

As for all manner of superstitious observances, I used once to think I must have been peculiar in having such a list of them, but I now believe that half the children of the same age go through the same experiences.  No Roman soothsayer ever had such a catalogue of omens as I found in the Sibylline leaves of my childhood.  That trick of throwing a stone at a tree and attaching some mighty issue to hitting or missing, which you will find mentioned in one or more biographies, I well remember.  Stepping on or over certain particular things or spots—­Dr. Johnson’s especial weakness—­I got the habit of at a very early age.—­I won’t swear that I have not some tendency to these not wise practices even at this present date. [How many of you that read these notes can say the same thing!]

With these follies mingled sweet delusions, which I loved so well I would not outgrow them, even when it required a voluntary effort to put a momentary trust in them.  Here is one which I cannot help telling you.

The firing of the great guns at the Navy-yard is easily heard at the place where I was born and lived.  “There is a ship of war come in,” they used to say, when they heard them.  Of course, I supposed that such vessels came in unexpectedly, after indefinite years of absence,—­suddenly as falling stones; and that the great guns roared in their astonishment and delight at the sight of the old warship splitting the bay with her cutwater.  Now, the sloop-of-war the Wasp, Captain Blakely, after gloriously capturing the Reindeer and the Avon, had disappeared from the face of the ocean, and was supposed to be lost.  But there was no proof of it, and, of course, for a time, hopes were entertained that she might be heard from.  Long after the last real chance had utterly vanished, I pleased myself with the fond illusion that somewhere on the waste of waters she was still floating, and there were years during which I never heard the sound of the great guns booming inland from the Navy-yard without saying to myself, “The Wasp has come!” and almost thinking I could see her, as she rolled in, crumpling