is forming.  So with this boy.  The same force which made of him a great savage marauder of the South Sea islands, though modified by a keener perception and a broader intelligence, affected him as he grew older.  There were a few books available to him; and what a reader he was, and what a listener!  His father would sometimes read aloud at night from current weeklies, and then the boy would sprawl along the floor, his feet toward the great fireplace, his head upon a rolled-up sheepskin, and drink in every word.  “East Lynne” was running as a serial then, and he would have given all his worldly possessions to have had Sir Francis Levison alone in the wood, and had his spear, and at his back some half-dozen of the boys whom he could name.  In some publication, too, at about that time, appeared the tale of the adventures of Captain Gardiner and Captain Daggett in antarctic wastes, seeking the sea-lions’ skins, and the story of pluckiness and awful trial affected his imagination deeply.  Years afterward, when he himself was at death’s portal once, because of a grievous injury, and when ice was bound upon his head to keep away the fever from his brain, he imagined in his delirium that he was Captain Gardiner, and called aloud the orders to the crew which he had heard read when a boy, and which had so long lain in his memory’s storehouse among the unconsidered lumber.

The boy’s reading included all there was in his home, and the small collection was not a bad one.  “Chambers’ Miscellany” was in the accidental lot, and good for him it was.  “Chambers’ Miscellany” is better reading than much that is given to the world to-day, and the boy rioted in the adventure-flavored tales and sketches.  Scott’s poetical works were there, and Shakespeare, but the latter was read only for the story of the play, and “Titus Andronicus” outranked even “Hamlet” among the tragedies.  As for Scott, the stirring rhymes had marked effect, and this had one curious sequence.  Tales of the lance and tilting have ever captivated boys, and Grant was no exception.  Alf did not read so much, was of a nature less imaginative, and his younger brother, Valentine, read not at all, but among them was enacted a great scene of chivalry which ended almost in a tragedy.  Grant, his mind absorbed in jousting and its laurels, explained the thing to Alf and induced him to read the tales of various encounters.  Alf was more or less affected by the literature and ready to do his share toward making each of them a proper warrior fit for any fray.  They considered the situation with much earnestness, and concluded that the only way to joust was to joust, and that Valentine should act as marshal of the occasion, for a marshal at a tourney, they discovered, was a prime necessity.  As for coursers, barbs, destriers, or whatever name their noble steeds might bear, they had no choice.  There were but a couple of clumsy farm mares available to them, and these the knights secured, their only equipments being headstalls abstracted from the harness in the barn, while the course fixed upon was a meadow well out of sight from the houses and the eyes of the elders.  Valentine was instructed in his duties, particularly in the manner of giving the word of command. Laissez aller, as found in “Ivanhoe,” Grant did not understand, but a passage from “The Lady of the Lake”: