In after years my friend, Professor E. H. Palmer, translated this into Arabic, and promised me that it should be sung in the East. It is not much of a poem, even for a boy, but there is one touch true to life in it--which is the _cursing_. This must have come to me by revelation; and in after years in Cairo I never heard a native address another as "_Afrit_! _Ya-hinzeer_--_wa Yahud_--_yin uldeen ak_?"--"curse your religion!"--but I thought how marvellous it was that I, even in my infancy, had divined so well how they did it! However, now I come to think of it, I had the year before read Morier's "Haji-Baba" with great admiration, and I doubt not that it was the influence of that remarkable book which produced this beautiful result. In after years I met with a lady who was a daughter of Morier. Apropos of the _book_, it reminds me that I specially recall my _reviewing_ it mentally many times. I have reviewed my early life in quiet, old-fashioned, shaded Philadelphia and in rural New England so continually and carefully all the time ever since it passed that I am sure its minutest detail on any day would now be accurately recalled at the least suggestion. As I shall almost certainly write this whole work without referring to a note or journal or other document, it will be seen that I remember the past pretty well. What is most remarkable in it all, if I _can_ make myself intelligible, is that what between the deep and indelible impression made on my mind by _books_, and that of scenery and characters now passed away--the two being connected--it all seems to me now to be as it were vividly depicted, coloured, or _written_ in my mind, like pages in an illuminated or illustrated romance. As some one has said that dreams are novels which we read when asleep, so bygone memories, when continually revived and associated with the subtle and delicate influences of _reading_, really become fixed literature to us, glide into it, and are virtually turned to copy, which only awaits type. Thus a _scene_ to one highly cultivated in art is really a picture, to a degree which few actually realise, though they may fancy they do, because to actually master this harmony requires so many years of study and thought that I very rarely meet with perfect instances of it. De Quincey and Coleridge are two of the best illustrations whom I can recall, while certain analytical character-sifters in modern novels seem the farthest remote from such genial naturalness. At the end of the first year my brother returned to Philadelphia. I passed the summer at Dr. Stimson's, in Dedham, wandering about in the woods with my bow, fishing in the river, reading always whatever fate or a small circulating library provided--I remember that "The Devil on Two Sticks" and the "Narrative of Captain Boyle" were in it--and carving spoons and serpents from wood, which was a premonition of my later work in this line, and of my "Manual of Wood-Carving."