millionaire in lodgings. Mr. S. C. Walker had given over his school to a younger brother named Joseph, but it was still kept in the old house in Eighth Street, where also I had taken my lessons in the rudiments of Transcendentalism from the Orphic Alcott. It was now a fairly good school as things went in those days, with the same lectures in Natural Philosophy and Chemistry--the same mild doses of French and Latin. The chief assistant was E. Otis Kimball, subsequently a professor of astronomy, a very gentlemanly and capable instructor, of a much higher type than any assistant-teacher whom I had ever before met. Under him I read Voltaire's "Charles the Twelfth." George H. Boker, who was one year older than I, and the son of my father's old partner, went to this school. I do not remember that for the first year or eighteen mouths after my return to Philadelphia there was any incident of note in my life, or that I read anything unless it was Shakespeare, and reviews which much influenced me. However, I was very wisely allowed to attend a gymnasium, kept by a man named Hudson. Here there was a sporting tone, much pistol-shooting at a mark, boxing and fencing, prints of prize-fighters on the wall, and cuts from _Life in London_, with copious cigar-smoke. It was a wholesome, healthy place for me. Unfortunately, I could not afford the shooting, boxing, &c., but I profited somewhat by it, both morally and physically. At this critical period, or a little later, a few pounds a year judiciously invested in sport and "dissipation" would have changed the whole current of my life, probably much for the better, and it would certainly have spared my poor father the conviction, which he had almost to his death, that I was a sad and mortifying failure or exception which had not paid its investment; for which opinion he was in no wise to blame, it being also that of all his business acquaintances, many of whose sons, it was true, went utterly to the devil, but then it was in the ancient intelligible, common-sensible, usual paths of gambling, horsing, stock-brokering, selling short, or ruining all their relatives by speculating with their money. However, there was also the--rather forlorn--hope ahead that I would do something in a profession. The school went on, Mr. Walker studying law meantime till he had passed his examination, when it was transferred to Mr. B. P. Hunt. With this man, who became and remained my intimate friend till his death, thirty years after, came the first faint intimation of what was destined to be the most critical, the most singular, and by far the most important period of my life.