"_The Negro Plot at New York_," he says, "helped to implant a feeling in me which it took Mr. Garrison a good many years to root out. _Thinks I to myself_, an old novel which has been attributed to a famous statesman, introduced me to a world of fiction which was not represented on the shelves of the library proper, unless perhaps by _Caelebs in search of a Wife_, or allegories of the bitter tonic class." Then there was an old, old Latin alchemy book, with the manuscript annotations of some ancient Rosicrucian, "In the pages of which," he says, "I had a vague notion that I might find the mighty secret of the _Lapis Philosophorum_, otherwise called Chaos, the Dragon, the Green Lion, the _Quinta Essentia_, the Soap of Sages, the vinegar of Heavenly Grace, the Egg, the Old Man, the Sun, the Moon, and by all manner of odd _aliases_, as I am assured by the plethoric little book before me, in parchment covers browned like a meerschaum with the smoke of furnaces, and the thumbing of dead gold-seekers, and the fingering of bony-handed book-misers, and the long intervals of dusty slumber on the shelves of the _bonquiniste_." "I have never lost my taste for alchemy," he adds, "since I first got hold of the _Palladium Spagyricum_ of Peter John Faber, and sought--in vain, it is true--through its pages for a clear, intelligible, and practical statement of how I could turn my lead sinkers and the weights of the tall kitchen clock into good yellow gold specific gravity, 19.2, and exchangeable for whatever I then wanted, and for many more things than I was then aware of. "One of the greatest pleasures of childhood is found in the mysteries which it hides from the scepticism of the elders, and works up into small mythologies of its own. I have seen all this played over again in adult life, the same delightful bewilderment of semi-emotional belief in listening to the gaseous promises of this or that fantastic system, that I found in the pleasing mirages conjured up for me by the ragged old volume I used to pore over in the southeast attic chamber." There are other reminiscences of these days that show us not only the outward surroundings, but the inner workings of the boy's mind. "The great Destroyer," he says, "had come near me, but never so as to be distinctly seen and remembered during my tender years. There flits dimly before me the image of a little girl whose name even I have forgotten, a schoolmate whom we missed one day, and were told that she had died. But what death was I never had any very distinct idea until one day I climbed the low stone-wall of the old burial ground and mingled with a group that were looking into a very deep, long, narrow hole, dug down through the green sod, down through the brown loam, down through the yellow gravel, and there at the bottom was an oblong red box, and a still, sharp, white face of a young man seen through an opening at one end of it.