of familiarity and identification only less powerful than my corresponding feeling for the eighteenth century. In a way, the two feelings worked together; for when I sought out the original classics from which the childish tales were taken, I found them very largely in late seventeenth and eighteenth century translations. The imaginative stimulus was immense, and for a time I actually thought I glimpsed fauns and dryads in certain venerable groves. I used to build altars and offer sacrifices to Pan, Diana, Apollo, and Minerva.
About this period the weird illustrations of Gustave Doré—met in editions of Dante, Milton, and The Ancient Mariner—affected me powerfully. For the first time I began to attempt writing—the earliest piece I can recall being a tale of a hideous cave perpetrated at the age of seven and entitled The Noble Eavesdropper. This does not survive, though I still possess two hilariously infantile efforts dating from the following year—The Mysterious Ship and The Secret of the Grave, whose titles display sufficiently the direction of my tastes.
At the age of about eight I acquired a strong interest in the sciences, which undoubtedly arose from the mysterious-looking pictures of Philosophical and Scientific Instruments in the back of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary. Chemistry came first, and I soon had a very attractive little laboratory in the basement of my home. Next came geography—with a weird fascination centreing in the antarctic continent and other pathless realms of remote wonder. Finally astronomy dawned on me—and the lure of other worlds and inconceivable cosmic gulfs eclipsed all other interests for a long period after my twelfth birthday. I published a small hectographed paper called The Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy and at last—when sixteen—broke into actual newspaper print with astronomical matter, contributing monthly articles on current phenomena to a local daily, and flooding the weekly rural press with more expansive miscellany.
It was while in high-school—which I was able to attend with some regularity—that I first produced weird stories of any degree of coherence and seriousness. They were largely trash, and I destroyed the bulk of them when eighteen; but one or two probably came up to the average pulp level. Of them all I have kept only The Beast in the Cave (1905) and The Alchemist (1908). At this stage most of my incessant, voluminous writing was scientific and classical, weird material taking a relatively minor place. Science had removed my belief in the supernatural, and truth for the moment captivated me more than dreams. I am still a mechanistic materialist in philosophy. As for reading—I mixed science, history, general literature, weird literature, and utter juvenile rubbish with the most complete unconventionality.
Parallel with all these reading and writing interests I had a very enjoyable childhood; the early years well enlivened with toys and with outdoor diversions, and the stretch after my tenth birthday dominated by a persistent though perforce short-distance cycling which made me familiar with all the picturesque and fancy-exciting phases of the New England village and rural landscape. Nor was I by any means a hermit—more than one band of local boyhood having me on its rolls.
My health prevented college attendance; but informal studies at home, and the influence of a notably scholarly physician-uncle, helped to banish some of the worst effects of the lack. In the years which should have been collegiate I veered from science to literature, specializing in the products of that eighteenth century of which I felt myself so oddly a part. Weird writing was then in abeyance, although I read everything spectral that I could find—including the frequent bizarre items in such cheap magazines as The All-Story and The Black Cat. My own products were largely verse and essays—uniformly worthless and now relegated to eternal concealment.
In 1914 I discovered and joined the United Amateur Press Association, one of
