member that the most awful terrors were in my mind of what these sciences could be in operation if their mere elements were so forbidding, and cold, and tyrannical. My father had a theory that any man able to "keep a set of books" could never be ship-wrecked in life. He had tried to instil a passion for book-keeping into my mind. So intense was my loathing of that black art that to this day the mere mention of it rouses me to fury. In fine, I may say that I had laid the foundation of what was called a commercial education, and upon this I had raised up my own sole and overwhelming horror of arithmetical figures, triangles, debtor and creditor, and unknown quantities.
Sufficient of the old leaven of the Fowlers worked in Harding, not only to draw him into the grain trade, but to make him still shy of "sweet sounds that give delight and hurt not." There was no musical instrument in the house, but books—
There were hundreds of books!
An inexhaustible mine of books, and such as I had never dreamed of before! Books that my cousins Nellie and George had had when they were young, Fairy tales and stories of adventure, novels and poetry! In the cold grey times of that winter my soul took fire. My spirit sprang up from long drowsing in the husk of the chrysalis, and put forth golden and azure and purple wings, and soared into skies of endless glories beyond the sun. All day long I went enchanted through enchanted palaces, where moved stately princesses with gold brocaded robes and haughty eyes, and voices of mystic tones. I led armies against the Saracen, and spread terrors never dreamed on earth before, and exercised clemencies that made heaven envious. I headed cavalcades through winding streets where the air was thick with banners. I bore the Black Knight backward out of his saddle in the list, and clove the plumed helmet of the leaguer in the breach. I harangued my troops on the field of victory, and pardoned my foes in the shrines of their heathen gods.
But I did not know how the sound of a trumpet stirred, or what dancing was, or love. I had never heard a musical instrument in my life or seen a festival, and I was too young for love—and yet, perhaps, not all too young for noble love and chivalry, if the princess or the lady came my way.
With the spring of the next year health began to stir in my veins. I shook off all the lassitudes and languors of illness, and by April I felt better than ever in my young life before. With returning health, the romantic rapture which had come to me out of books grew and intensified. There was no talk of my going home, or more correctly, there had been talk of it, and my kind relatives, the Hardings, had declared that nothing but force should take me from them until I had been fully fortified by spending a whole summer in the more genial south.
In our own Glen, all the time I could steal from the detested weights and measures and triangles, and debit and credit side of the fabulous transactions of that creature, John Jones, Esq., I spent far afield among the hills. Here, near Bickerton, this spring I found all I cared for of Nature in the sky above me, and in the large, old-fashioned garden; and all I desired of enchantment in the magical books. I rarely went beyond the garden-gate, and never into the town. I became a youthful recluse in the boundless realms of fancy. I lorded it over empires and cities of men. Space, the space of the furthest wandering star, was not vast enough to accommodate the realms that rose in mist out of the pages of the poets and romancists.
I was a precocious boy. I knew nothing of boys' games and sports, and all at once I had come out of the cold, arid life at Bracken Glen into the rich and varied lights and colours of poetry. The change was overwhelming and intoxicating. My reading had, in a vague way, been progressive. I had begun with fairy tales. To these had succeeded stories of adventure and travel, and to them poetry and plays. Prose romances and novels came last, for I had fought shy of them at first, considering that they dealt too much with people and scenes like those in my own experience of life. When first I broke free among books I wished to forget the world.
Towards the end of April two things drove me to the novels. The supply of other books had been exhausted, and I began to yearn after a glimpse at what possibilities of poetry and wonder still existed in the world, as the world was going on outside the sphere of my experience. I wanted to see in books the things now visible to other eyes still on earth—things hidden from me by barriers of age and circumstances I could not understand.
From this desire arose the romance of my life.
