We went from the border to the south of England, when the number of my years was six, and in England we found another paradise, a circulating library with brown, greasy, ill-printed, odd volumes of Shakespeare and of the "Arabian Nights." How their stained pages come before the eyes again--the pleasure and the puzzle of them! What did the lady in the Geni's glass box want with the Merchants? what meant all these conversations between the Fat Knight and _Ford_, in the "Merry Wives"? It was delightful, but in parts it was difficult. Fragments of "The Tempest," and of other plays, remain stranded in my memory from these readings: _Ferdinand_ and _Miranda_ at chess, _Cleopatra_ cuffing the messenger, the asp in the basket of figs, the _Friar_ and the _Apothecary_, _Troilus_ on the Ilian walls, a vision of _Cassandra_ in white muslin with her hair down. People forbid children to read this or that. I am sure they need not, and that even in our infancy the magician, Shakespeare, brings us nothing worse than a world of beautiful visions, half realised. In the Egyptian wizard's little pool of ink, only the pure can see the visions, and in Shakespeare's magic mirror children see only what is pure. Among other books of that time I only recall a kind of Sunday novel, "Naomi; or, The Last Days of Jerusalem." Who, indeed, could forget the battering-rams, and the man who cried on the battlements, "Woe, woe to myself and to Jerusalem!" I seem to hear him again when boys break the hum of London with yells of the latest "disaster." We left England in a year, went back to Scotland, and awoke, as it were, to know the glories of our birth. We lived in Scott's country, within four miles of Abbotsford, and, so far, we had heard nothing of it. I remember going with one of the maids into the cottage of a kinsman of hers, a carpenter; a delightful place, where there was sawdust, where our first fishing-rods were fashioned. Rummaging among the books, of course, I found some cheap periodical with verses in it. The lines began-- "The Baron of Smaylhome rose with day, He spurred his courser on, Without stop or stay, down the rocky way That leads to Brotherstone." A rustic tea-table was spread for us, with scones and honey, not to be neglected. But they _were_ neglected till we had learned how-- "The sable score of fingers four Remains on that board impressed, And for evermore that lady wore A covering on her wrist." We did not know nor ask the poet's name. Children, probably, say very little about what is in their minds; but that unhappy knight, Sir Richard of Coldinghame, and the Priest, with his chamber in the east, and the moody Baron, and the Lady, have dwelt in our mind ever since, and hardly need to be revived by looking at "The Eve of St. John."