One night I awoke and found myself in a watermelon patch. I was never so ashamed in my life. It is a very serious thing to be awakened so rudely out of a sound sleep, by a bull dog, to find yourself in the watermelon vineyard of a man with whom you are not acquainted. I was not on terms of social intimacy with this man or his dog. They did not belong to our set. We had never been thrown together before. After that I was called the great somnambulist and men who had watermelon conservatories shunned me. But it cured me of my somnambulism. I have never tried to somnambule any more since that time. There are other little incidents of my school days that come trooping up in my memory at this moment, but they were not startling in their nature. Mine is but the history of one who struggled on year after year, trying to do better, but most always failing to connect. The boys of Boston would do well to study carefully my record and then--do differently. RECOLLECTIONS OF NOAH WEBSTER. Mr. Webster, no doubt, had the best command of language of any American author prior to our day. Those who have read his ponderous but rather disconnected romance known as "Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, or How One Word Led on to Another," will agree with me that he was smart. Noah never lacked for a word by which to express himself. He was a brainy man and a good speller. It would ill become me at this late day to criticise Mr. Webster's great work--a work that is now in almost every library, schoolroom and counting house in the land. It is a great book. I do believe that had Mr. Webster lived he would have been equally fair in his criticism of my books. I hate to compare my own works with those of Mr. Webster, because it may seem egotistical in me to point out the good points in my literary labors; but I have often heard it said, and so do not state it solely upon my own responsibility, that Mr. Webster's book does not retain the interest of the reader all the way through. He has tried to introduce too many characters, and so we cannot follow them all the way through. It is a good book to pick up and while away an idle hour with, perhaps, but no one would cling to it at night till the fire went out, chained to the thrilling plot and the glowing career of its hero. Therein consists the great difference between Mr. Webster and myself. A friend of mine at Sing Sing once wrote me that from the moment he got hold of my book, he never left his room till he finished it. He seemed chained to the spot, he said, and if you can't believe a convict, who is entirely out of politics, who in the name of George Washington can you believe?