Of the _Monthly_ I have more distinct recollections. It was in these that I first began to read freely. Many a private picnic did I have with the _Monthly_ under the thorn bushes on the hillside above Oil Creek, a lunch basket at my side. There are still in the family storeroom copies of _Harper’s Monthly_ stained with lemon pie dropped when I was too deep into a story to be careful. Here I read my first Dickens, my first Thackeray, my first Marian Evans, as George Eliot then signed herself. My first Wilkie Collins came to me in the _Weekly_. Great literature—all pirated, I was to learn much later. My friend Viola Roseboro tells me that at this time she was reading Harper’s pirated paper-bound copies of Dickens. It was much later that they came my way. However, all the reading I was doing was not so respectable. On the sly I was devouring a sheet forbidden to the household—the _Police Gazette_—the property of the men around the house, for we had men around the house, men of various degrees of acceptability to my mother, but all necessary to my father’s enterprises. The business had grown; it meant a clerk, bosses, workmen. In a pioneer community like ours it was hard to find comfortable living quarters for single men. My father and mother, both brought up on farms, accepted as a matter of course the housing and feeding of hired men. So it was in line with their experience as well as with the necessities of the case that our household was arranged to take care of a certain number of men connected with my father’s business. For sleeping quarters a bunkhouse was built on the hillside; mornings and evenings, they sat at the family table. This accepting men of whose manners and ways she often heartily disapproved was distasteful to my mother; but she had not been a schoolteacher for nothing, and she applied her notions of discipline. She would not have swearing, drinking, rough manners, and certainly she would not have had the _Police Gazette_ in the house. But the men had it, and now and then when my brother and I played about the bunkhouse it was easy for me to pick up a copy and slip it away where my dearest girl friend and I looked unashamed and entirely unknowing on its rough and brutal pictures. If they were obscene we certainly never knew it. There was a wanton gaiety about the women, a violent rakishness about the men—wicked, we supposed, but not the less interesting for that. One reason the _Police Gazette_ fascinated me was that it pictured a kind of life I knew to be flourishing in a neighboring settlement, a settlement where my father had shops run by a boss who, as well as his sister, was a family friend, and where I was often allowed to visit. This settlement, Petroleum Center, had by something like general consent become Oil Creek’s “sink of iniquity.”