During the winter we passed at Columbus I suppose that my father read things aloud to us after his old habit, and that I listened with the rest.  I have a dim notion of first knowing Thomson’s ’Castle of Indolence’ in this way, but I was getting more and more impatient of having things read to me.  The trouble was that I caught some thought or image from the text, and that my fancy remained playing with that while the reading went on, and I lost the rest.  But I think the reading was less in every way than it had been, because his work was exhausting and his leisure less.  My own hours in the printing-office began at seven and ended at six, with an hour at noon for dinner, which I often used for putting down such verses as had come to me during the morning.  As soon as supper was over at night I got out my manuscripts, which I kept in great disorder, and written in several different hands on several different kinds of paper, and sawed, and filed, and hammered away at my blessed Popean heroics till nine, when I went regularly to bed, to rise again at five.  Sometimes the foreman gave me an afternoon off on Saturdays, and though the days were long the work was not always constant, and was never very severe.  I suspect now the office was not so prosperous as might have been wished.  I was shifted from place to place in it, and there was plenty of time for my day-dreams over the distribution of my case.  I was very fond of my work, though, and proud of my swiftness and skill in it.  Once when the perplexed foreman could not think of any task to set me he offered me a holiday, but I would not take it, so I fancy that at this time I was not more interested in my art of poetry than in my trade of printing.  What went on in the office interested me as much as the quarrels of the Augustan age of English letters, and I made much more record of it in the crude and shapeless diary which I kept, partly in verse and partly in prose, but always of a distinctly lower literary kind than that I was trying otherwise to write.  There must have been some mention in it of the tremendous combat with wet sponges I saw there one day between two of the boys who hurled them back and forth at each other.  This amiable fray, carried on during the foreman’s absence, forced upon my notice for the first time the boy who has come to be a name well-known in literature.  I admired his vigor as a combatant, but I never spoke to him at that time, and I never dreamed that he, too, was effervescing with verse, probably as fiercely as myself.  Six or seven years later we met again, when we had both become journalists, and had both had poems accepted by Mr. Lowell for the Atlantic Monthly, and then we formed a literary friendship which eventuated in the joint publication of a volume of verse.  ’The Poems of Two Friends’ became instantly and lastingly unknown to fame; the West waited, as it always does, to hear what the East should say; the East said nothing, and two-thirds of the small edition of five hundred