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long departed. A huge bucket with water stood at one extremity of the
room, and a clock of stupendous dimensions at the other.
Encompassed by the massy walls of this venerable academy, I passed, yet
not in tedium or disgust, the years of the third lustrum of my life.
The teeming brain of childhood requires no external world of incident to
occupy or amuse it; and the apparently dismal monotony of a school was
replete with more intense excitement than my riper youth has derived
from luxury, or my full manhood from crime. Yet I must believe that my
first mental development had in it much of the uncommon--even much of
the outre. Upon mankind at large the events of very early existence
rarely leave in mature age any definite impression. All is gray
shadow--a weak and irregular remembrance--an indistinct regathering of
feeble pleasures and phantasmagoric pains. With me this is not so. In
childhood I must have felt with the energy of a man what I now find
stamped upon memory in lines as vivid, as deep, and as durable as the
exergues of the Carthaginian medals.
Yet in fact--in the fact of the world's view--how little was there
to remember! The morning's awakening, the nightly summons to bed;
the connings, the recitations; the periodical half-holidays, and
perambulations; the play-ground, with its broils, its pastimes, its
intrigues;--these, by a mental sorcery long forgotten, were made to
involve a wilderness of sensation, a world of rich incident, an
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