tells that I was wont to arrange six open books on six chairs, and go from one to the others, perusing them by turns.  No doubt this was what people call “desultory reading,” but I did not hear the criticism till later, and then too often for my comfort.  Memory holds a picture, more vivid than most, of a small boy reading the “Midsummer Night’s Dream” by firelight, in a room where candles were lit, and some one touched the piano, and a young man and a girl were playing chess.  The Shakespeare was a volume of Kenny Meadows’ edition; there are fairies in it, and the fairies seemed to come out of Shakespeare’s dream into the music and the firelight.  At that moment I think that I was happy; it seemed an enchanted glimpse of eternity in Paradise; nothing resembling it remains with me, out of all the years.

We went from the border to the south of England, when the number of my years was six, and in England we found another paradise, a circulating library with brown, greasy, ill-printed, odd volumes of Shakespeare and of the “Arabian Nights.”  How their stained pages come before the eyes again—­the pleasure and the puzzle of them!  What did the lady in the Geni’s glass box want with the Merchants? what meant all these conversations between the Fat Knight and Ford, in the “Merry Wives”?  It was delightful, but in parts it was difficult.  Fragments of “The Tempest,” and of other plays, remain stranded in my memory from these readings:  Ferdinand and Miranda at chess, Cleopatra cuffing the messenger, the asp in the basket of figs, the Friar and the Apothecary, Troilus on the Ilian walls, a vision of Cassandra in white muslin with her hair down.  People forbid children to read this or that.  I am sure they need not, and that even in our infancy the magician, Shakespeare, brings us nothing worse than a world of beautiful visions, half realised.  In the Egyptian wizard’s little pool of ink, only the pure can see the visions, and in Shakespeare’s magic mirror children see only what is pure.  Among other books of that time I only recall a kind of Sunday novel, “Naomi; or, The Last Days of Jerusalem.”  Who, indeed, could forget the battering-rams, and the man who cried on the battlements, “Woe, woe to myself and to Jerusalem!” I seem to hear him again when boys break the hum of London with yells of the latest “disaster.”

We left England in a year, went back to Scotland, and awoke, as it were, to know the glories of our birth.  We lived in Scott’s country, within four miles of Abbotsford, and, so far, we had heard nothing of it.  I remember going with one of the maids into the cottage of a kinsman of hers, a carpenter; a delightful place, where there was sawdust, where our first fishing-rods were fashioned.  Rummaging among the books, of course, I found some cheap periodical with verses in it.  The lines began—­

   “The Baron of Smaylhome rose with day,
      He spurred his courser on,
   Without stop or stay, down the rocky way
      That leads to Brotherstone.”