The boys built two large snow-houses, roofed in or arched over with hard snow. One was ingeniously and appropriately like an Eskimo hut, with a rather long winding passage leading into it. Of these I wrote in the spring, when the sun had begun to act, "one is almost annihilated, and of the other not a _vestage_ remains." I found the letter by chance many years later. There lived in Boston some friends of my mother's named Gay. In the family was an old lady over eighty, who was a wonderfully lively spirited person. She still sang, as I thought, very beautifully, to the lute, old songs such as "The merry days of good Queen Bess," and remembered the old Colonial time as if it were of yesterday. One day Mr. Gay came out and took me to his house, where I remained from Saturday until Monday; during which time I found among the books, and very nearly read through, all the poems of Peter Pindar or Doctor Wolcott. Precious reading it was for a boy of eleven, yet I enjoyed it immensely. While there, I found in the earth in the garden an oval, dark-green porphyry pebble, which I, moved by a strange feeling, preserved for many years as an amulet. It is very curious that exactly such pebbles are found as fetishes all over the world, and the famous conjuring stone of the Voodoos, which I possess, is only an ordinary black flint pebble of the same shape. Negroes have travelled a thousand miles to hold it in their hands and make a wish, which, if uttered with _faith_, is always granted. Its possession alone entitles any one to the first rank as master in the mysteries of Voodoo sorcery. Truly I began early in the business! I may here say that since I owned the Voodoo stone it has been held in several very famous and a few very beautiful hands. While I was at Mr. Greene's I wrote my first poem. I certainly exhibited no great precocity of lyrical genius in it, but the reader must remember that I was only a foolish little boy of ten or eleven at the time, and that I showed it to no one. It was as follows: "As a long-bearded Sultan, an infidel Turk, Who ne'er in his life had done any work, Rode along to the bath, he saw Hassan the black, With two monstrous water-skins high on his back. "'Ho, Hassan, thou afreet! thou infidel dog! Thou son of a Jewess and eater of hog! This instant, this second, put down thy skin jugs, And for my sovereign pleasure remove both the plugs!' "The negro obeyed him, put both on the ground, And opened the skins and the water flew round; The Sultan looked on till he laughed his fill; Then went on to the bath, feeling heated and ill. "When arrived at the bath, 'Is all ready?' he cries. 'Indeed it is not, sire,' the bath-man replies; 'For to fetch the bath-water black Hassan has gone, And your highness can't have it till he shall return.'"