There was a red-covered “Book of Snobs;” “Vanity Fair” with no cover at all; “Scottish Chiefs” in crimson; a brown copy of George Sand’s “Teverino;” and next it a green Bailey’s “Festus,” which I only attacked when mentally rabid, and a little of which went a surprisingly long way; and then a maroon “David Copperfield,” whose pages were limp with my kisses. (To write a book that a child would kiss!  Oh, dear reward! oh, sweet, sweet fame!)

In one corner—­spare me your smiles—­was a fat autobiography of P.T.  Barnum, given me by a grateful farmer for saving the life of a valuable Jersey calf just as she was on the point of strangling herself.  This book so inflamed a naturally ardent imagination, that I was with difficulty dissuaded from entering the arena as a circus manager.  Considerations of age or sex had no weight with me, and lack of capital eventually proved the deterrent force.  On the shelf above were “Kenilworth,” “The Lady of the Lake,” and half of “Rob Roy.”  I have always hesitated to read the other half, for fear that it should not end precisely as I made it end when I was forced, by necessity, to supplement Sir Walter Scott.  Then there was “Gulliver’s Travels,” and if any of the stories seemed difficult to believe, I had only to turn to the maps of Lilliput and Brobdingnag, with the degrees of latitude and longitude duly marked, which always convinced me that everything was fair and aboveboard.  Of course, there was a great green and gold Shakespeare, not a properly expurgated edition for female seminaries, either, nor even prose tales from Shakespeare adapted to young readers, but the real thing.  We expurgated as we read, child fashion, taking into our sleek little heads all that we could comprehend or apprehend, and unconsciously passing over what might have been hurtful, perhaps, at a later period.  I suppose we failed to get a very close conception of Shakespeare’s colossal genius, but we did get a tremendous and lasting impression of force and power, life and truth.

When we declaimed certain scenes in an upper chamber with sloping walls and dormer windows, a bed for a throne, a cotton umbrella for a sceptre, our creations were harmless enough.  If I remember rightly, our nine-year-old Lady Macbeths and Iagos, Falstaffs and Cleopatras, after they had been dipped in the divine alembic of childish innocence, came out so respectable that they would not have brought the historic “blush to the cheek of youth.”

On the shelf above the Shakespeare were a few things presumably better suited to childish tastes,—­Hawthorne’s “Wonder Book,” Kingsley’s “Water Babies,” Miss Edgeworth’s “Rosamond,” and the “Arabian Nights.”

There were also two little tales given us by a wandering revivalist, who was on a starring tour through the New England villages, “How Gussie Grew in Grace,” and “Little Harriet’s Work for the Heathen,”—­melodramatic histories of spiritually perfect and physically feeble children who blessed the world for a season, but died young, enlivened by a few pages devoted to completely vicious and adorable ones who lived to curse the world to a good old age.