Hurlbut's became at last simply intolerable, and my parents, finding out in some way that I was worse for being there, removed me to a far better school kept by E. C. Wines, who had written books on education, and attained some fame thereby. This was in 1839-'40, and I was there to be prepared for college. We were soon introduced to an old French gentleman, who was to teach us, and who asked the other boys what French works they had read. Some had gone through _Telemaque_, or _Paul et Virginie_, _Florian_, _etcetera_. The good-goody nature of such reading awoke in me my sense of humour. When it came to my turn, and I was asked, I replied, "_La Pucelle d'Orleans_ and _Dictionnaire Philosophique_ of Voltaire, the Confessions of Rousseau, the Poems of Villon, _Charles d'Orleans_, _Clotilde de Surville_, and more or less of Helvetius, D'Holbach, and Condillac." Here the professor, feeling himself quizzed, cast forth his hands as in disgust and horror, and cried, "_Assez_! _assez_! Unhappy boy, you have raked through the library of the devil down to the dregs!" Nor was I "selling" him, for I certainly had read the works, as the records of the Philadelphia Library can in a great measure prove, and did not speak by hearsay. I had at this time several severe long attacks of illness with much pain, which I always bore well, as a matter of course or habit. But rather oddly, while in the midst of my Transcendentalism, and reading every scrap of everything about Germany which I could get, and metaphysics, and study--I was very far gone then, and used to go home from school and light a pipe with a long wooden stem, and study the beloved "Critic of Pure Reason" or Carlyle's Miscellanies, having discovered that smoking was absolutely necessary in such reading--[De Quincey required a quart of laudanum to enable him to enjoy German metaphysics]--there came a strange gleam of worldly dissipation, of which I never think without pleasure. I had passed one summer vacation on a farm near Philadelphia, where I learned something in wood-ranging about wild herbs and catching land-tortoises and "coon-hunting," and had been allowed to hire and ride a horse.