While living at Mrs. Eaton's I was sent to a school kept by two very nice rather young Quaker ladies in Walnut Street. It was just opposite a very quaint old-fashioned collection of many little dwellings in one (modelled after the Fuggerei of Augsburg?) known as the Quaker Almshouse. One morning I played truant, and became so fearfully weary and bored lounging about, that I longed for the society of school, and never stayed from study any more. Here I was learning to read, and I can remember "The History of Little Jack," and discussing with a comrade the question as to whether the word _history_ really meant _his_ story, or was ingeniously double and inclusive. I also about this time became familiar with many minor works, such as are all now sold at high prices as chap-books, such as "Marmaduke Multiply," "The World Turned Upside Down," "Chrononhotonthologos," "The Noble History of the Giants," and others of Mr. Newberry's gilt-cover toy-books. All of our juvenile literature in those days was without exception London made, and very few persons can now realise how deeply Anglicised I was, and how all this reading produced associations and feelings which made dwelling in England in later years seem like a return to a half-forgotten home, of which we have, however, pleasant fairy-tale reminiscences. The mistress of the school was named Sarah Lewis, and while there, something of a very extraordinary nature--to me, at least--took place. One day, while at my little desk, there came into my head with a strange and unaccountable intensity this thought: "I am I--I am _Myself_--I myself _I_," and so on. By forcing this thought on myself very rapidly, I produced a something like suspension of thought or syncope; not a vertigo, but that mental condition which is allied to it. I have several times read of men who recorded nearly the same thing among their youthful experiences, but I do not recall that any of them induced this _coma_ by reflecting on the ego-ism of the I, or the me-ness of the Me. {16} It often recurred to me in after years when studying Schelling and Fichte, or reading works by Mystics, Quietists, and the like. At a very early age I was indeed very much given to indulging in states of mind resembling metaphysical abstraction--a kind of vague marvelling what I _was_ and what others were; whether they and everything were not spirits playing me tricks, or a delusion--a kind of psychology without material or thought, like a workman without tools.