understanding and sympathy.

It was he gave me most of my toys and, I more than suspect, most of

my ideas. "Here's some corrugated iron," he would say, "suitable

for roofs and fencing," and hand me a lump of that stiff crinkled

paper that is used for packing medicine bottles. Or, "Dick, do you

see the tiger loose near the Imperial Road?-won't do for your

cattle ranch." And I would find a bright new lead tiger like a

special creation at large in the world, and demanding a hunting

expedition and much elaborate effort to get him safely housed in the

city menagerie beside the captured dragon crocodile, tamed now, and

his key lost and the heart and spring gone out of him.

And to the various irregular reading of my father I owe the

inestimable blessing of never having a boy's book in my boyhood

except those of Jules Verne. But my father used to get books for

himself and me from the Bromstead Institute, Fenimore Cooper and

Mayne Reid and illustrated histories; one of the Russo-Turkish war

and one of Napier's expedition to Abyssinia I read from end to end;

Stanley and Livingstone, lives of Wellington, Napoleon and

Garibaldi, and back volumes of PUNCH, from which I derived

conceptions of foreign and domestic politics it has taken years of

adult reflection to correct. And at home permanently we had Wood's

NATURAL HISTORY, a brand-new illustrated Green's HISTORY OF THE

ENGLISH PEOPLE, Irving's COMPANIONS OF COLUMBUS, a great number of

unbound parts of some geographical work, a VOYAGE ROUND THE WORLD I

think it was called, with pictures of foreign places, and Clarke's

NEW TESTAMENT with a map of Palestine, and a variety of other

informing books bought at sales. There was a Sowerby's BOTANY also,

<<BackPagesTo menuForward>>