Our own adversity had been growing, and now it became overwhelming.  We had to give up the paper we had struggled so hard to keep, but when the worst came it was not half so bad as what had gone before.  There was no more waiting till midnight for the telegraphic news, no more waking at dawn to deliver the papers, no more weary days at the case, heavier for the doom hanging over us.  My father and his brothers had long dreamed of a sort of family colony somewhere in the country, and now the uncle who was most prosperous bought a milling property on a river not far from Dayton, and my father went out to take charge of it until the others could shape their business to follow him.  The scheme came to nothing finally, but in the mean time we escaped from the little city and its sorrowful associations of fruitless labor, and had a year in the country, which was blest, at least to us children, by sojourn in a log-cabin, while a house was building for us.

VI.  LONGFELLOW’S “SPANISH STUDENT”

This log-cabin had a loft, where we boys slept, and in the loft were stored in barrels the books that had now begun to overflow the bookcase.  I do not know why I chose the loft to renew my long-neglected friendship with them.  The light could not have been good, though if I brought my books to the little gable window that overlooked the groaning and whistling gristmill I could see well enough.  But perhaps I liked the loft best because the books were handiest there, and because I could be alone.  At any rate, it was there that I read Longfellow’s “Spanish Student,” which I found in an old paper copy of his poems in one of the barrels, and I instantly conceived for it the passion which all things Spanish inspired in me.  As I read I not only renewed my acquaintance with literature, but renewed my delight in people and places where I had been happy before those heavy years in Dayton.  At the same time I felt a little jealousy, a little grudge, that any one else should love them as well as I, and if the poem had not been so beautiful I should have hated the poet for trespassing on my ground.  But I could not hold out long against the witchery of his verse.  The “Spanish Student” became one of my passions; a minor passion, not a grand one, like ‘Don Quixote’ and the ‘Conquest of Granada’, but still a passion, and I should dread a little to read the piece now, lest I should disturb my old ideal of its beauty.  The hero’s rogue servant, Chispa, seemed to me, then and long afterwards, so fine a bit of Spanish character that I chose his name for my first pseudonym when I began to write for the newspapers, and signed my legislative correspondence for a Cincinnati paper with it.  I was in love with the heroine, the lovely dancer whose ‘cachucha’ turned my head, along with that of the cardinal, but whose name even I have forgotten, and I went about with the thought of her burning in my heart, as if she had been a real person.