Then I approached the modern style and the truer type of boy books, stories of the Alger, Oliver Optic and G. A. Henty kind; and then the better type of adventure stories, such as “Treasure Island” and “King Solomon’s Mines.” Then I drifted into Wilkie Collins’ creations, reading only the more exciting ones--“The Moonstone” and “The Dead Alive.” After that came Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Reade; and before I was sixteen I had got into Scott, Thackeray and Dickens. And here I anchored. Since then, of course, I have voyaged far and wide in all directions, but Dickens is my snug harbour, and will be to the end. No boy could revel--shall I say wallow?--in trashy literature more than I did; but search as I will, I cannot see where it left a trace of an influence on my conduct or my character. I do not think it was owing to any want of physical courage; because I know that I did my share of fighting and took as many beatings with a dry eye as the others; a little more of both, in fact, than it would become me to boast about. But I never robbed a bank or had any desire to; I never craved the career of a detective keenly enough to try my hand at it, and while at one time I did yearn for a chance to battle single-handed with a band of Sioux warriors, the desire never led me into more dangerous quarters than a seat at the Wild West Show. Was I different from other boys? My mother says certainly I was, and very much better. God bless her! My father says I was about like the rest. My teacher--he is a prominent member of the New York bar now, and I put the question to him squarely just the other day--tells me frankly that I was the worst boy in school. The three estimates, averaged, would make me an average boy, and I think my experience as to the effect of reading material was about the usual experience of boys in general. They pass through the age of blood-and-thunder literature just as they have mumps, measles and marbles, and are none the better and but little the worse for having gone through it. As water finds its level, so the temperament eventually finds its affinity in reading matter. “There is no book so bad,” said the elder Pliny, “but that some good might be got out of it.” I know that some boys who read cheap literature go to the bad. But I have never seen it established that the reading was responsible for the waywardness. I do not deny that, granting the existence of a tendency toward a life of crime, certain types of stories might encourage the tendency. But the influence of this stuff is so slight that the avoidance of it would not prevent the downward step.