There was another book which greatly influenced my mind and life. I have forgotten the title, but it was a very remarkable collection of curiosities, such as accounts of a family of seven children who had every one some strange peculiarity, dwarfs and giants, and mysteriously-gifted mortals, and all kinds of odd beings and inventions. I obtained in a very mysterious way; for one day I found it in my desk, a blessed gift indeed from some unknown friend who had rightly judged of my tastes. This work I literally lived upon for a long time. Once a lady friend of my mother's came in winter and took me a-sleighing, but I had my dear book under my jacket, and contrived now and then to re-read some anecdote in it. In after years I found a copy of it in the Mercantile Library, Philadelphia, but I have never seen it elsewhere. {56} I had at Mr. Alcott's carefully studied all the Percy Anecdotes, and could repeat most of them when recalled by some association; also Goldsmith's "Animated Nature," the perusal of which latter work was to me as the waving of a forest and the sighing of deep waters. Then, too, I had read--in fact I owned--the famous Peter Parley books, which gave me, as they have to thousands of boys, a desire to travel and see the world. I marvelled greatly at finding that Peter Parley himself, or Mr. S. G. Goodrich, had a beautiful country-house very near our school, and his son Frank, who was a very pleasant and wonderfully polite and sunshiny boy, sat by me in school. Frank Goodrich in after life wrote a novel entitled "Flirtation and its Consequences," of which my brother said, "What are its consequences, Frank; good rich husbands? By no means." I can remember being invited to a perfectly heavenly garden-party at the Goodrichs', and evening visits there with my mother. And I may note by the way, that Frank himself lived abroad in after years; that his father became the American Consul in Paris, and that in 1848 he introduced to the _Gouvernement Provisoire_ the American delegation, of which I was one, and how we were caricatured in the _Charivari_, in which caricature I was specially depicted, the likeness being at once recognised by everybody, and how I knew nothing of it all till I was told about it by the beautiful Miss Goodrich, Frank's younger sister, on a Staten Island steamboat, many, many years after. And as a postscript I may add, that it is literally true that before I was quite twenty-three years of age I had been twice caricatured or pictorially jested on in the Munich _Fliegende Blatter_ and twice in the Paris _Charivari_, which may show that I was to a certain degree about town in those days, as I indeed was. While I am about it, I may as well tell the Munich tale. There was a pretty governess, a great friend of mine, who had charge of two children. Meeting her one day in the park, at a sign from me she pressed the children's hats down over their eyes with "Kinder, setzt eure Hute fester