over The Three Musketeers, lost to any consciousness of his surroundings, incapable of analyzing his emotions, breathless with mingled fear and exultation over his heroes' varying fortunes, and drinking in a host of vivid impressions that are absolutely ineffaceable from his mind. We cannot read in that fashion any longer, but we only wish we could. Thackeray used to sigh in middle age over the lost delights of five shillings' worth of pastry; but what was the pleasure of eating tarts to the glamour cast over us by our first romance, to the enchanted hours we spent with Sintram by the sea-shore, or with Nydia in the darkened streets of Pompeii, or perhaps—if we were not too carefully watched—with Emily in those dreadful vaults beneath Udolpho's walls!
Nor is it fiction only that strongly excites the imagination of a child. History is not to him what it is to us, a tangle of disputed facts, doubtful theories, and conflicting evidence. He grasps its salient points with simple directness, absorbs them into his mind with tolerable accuracy, and passes judgment on them with enviable ease. To him, histori-
