That summer, too, I found an old copy of "Midsummer Night's Dream" in the attic. The print was exceedingly fine, but everything was there. No doubt there is much to be said by the pedagogues in favour of scrupulously studying Shakespeare's plays; but if you have never discovered "As You Like It" or "Midsummer Night's Dream" when you were very young, you will never know the meaning of that light which never was on land or sea, and with which Keats surrounds us in the "Ode to the Nightingale." The love interest did not count much. In my youthful experience everybody either married or died, in books. That was to be expected. It was the atmosphere that counted. One could see the troopers coming into the open space in the Forest of Arden and hear their songs, making the leaves of the trees quiver before they appeared. And Puck! and Caliban! When I was young I was always very sorry for Caliban, and, being very religious, I felt that the potent Prospero might have done something for his soul. There was a boy who lived near us called Lawrence Stockdale--peace be to his ashes where-ever he rests! His father and mother, who were persons of cultivation, encouraged him to read, but we were not of one opinion on any subject. He was devoted to Dumas, the Elder. After the episode of "Monte Cristo" I was led to believe that Dumas was "wrong." I preferred Sir Walter Scott, and loved all the Stuarts, having a positive devotion for Mary, Queen of Scots. One day, however, I discovered somewhere, under a pile of old geometries and books about navigation, a fat, red-bound copy of "Boccaccio." Stockdale said that "Boccaccio" was "wronger" than Dumas, and that his people had warned him against the stories of this Italian. As we lived near an Italian colony, and he disliked Italians, while I loved them, I attributed this to mere prejudice. The "Boccaccio" was, as I have said, fat and large. For a boy who likes to read, a fat book is very tempting, and just as I had seated myself one afternoon on the front doorstep, to read the story of the Falcon, and having finished it with great pleasure, dipped into another tale not so edifying, my mother appeared. She turned pale with horror, and seized the book at once. My father was informed of what had occurred. He was little alarmed, I think. My mother said: "We shall have to change the whole course of this boy's reading." "We shall have to change the boy first," my father said, with a sigh. But this was not the end. At the proper time I was led to the Pastor, who was my mother's confessor. The book was presented to him for destruction. "It's a bad book," the Monsignore said. "I hope you didn't talk about any of these stories to the other boys in school?"