In my leisure from the printing-office I was in fact cultivating a sufficiently thankless muse in the imitation of Pope and Goldsmith, for in me, more than his other children, my father had divined and encouraged the love of poetry; but in reproducing his poets, as I constantly did, to his greater admiration than mine, I sometimes had a difficulty which I did not carry to him. There is no harm in now submitting it to the reader, who may have noted in his own case the serious disadvantage of writing about love when he had as yet had no experience of the passion. I did my best, and I suppose I did no worse than other poets of thirteen. But I fell back mostly upon inanimate nature, which I knew very well from the woods where I had hunted and the fields where I had hoed; to be honest, I never hoed so much as I hunted, and I never hunted very successfully. I now went many walks into the woods and fields about the town in my longing for the wider spaces I had known, and helped my sisters dig up the wild flowers which they brought home and planted in our yard. But I recall more distinctly than any other a Sunday walk which I took with my father across the Scioto to the forsaken town on the western bank of the river. Franklinton had been thought of as the capital before Columbus, and it has now been rehabilitated in an indefinitely greater prosperity than it ever enjoyed in its prime, but during my life in the city which so promptly won the capital away from it, Franklinton lay abandoned by nine-tenths of its inhabitants, and stretched over the plain in rows of small, empty brick dwellings. I have the impression of disused county buildings, but I am not sure of them; I heard (but in days when I did not much concern myself with such poor unliterary facts) that the notion of Franklinton as the capital was rejected because it was apt in springtime to be flooded by the Scioto, and was at other seasons infested by malaria which the swarms of mosquitoes bore to every household. The people, mostly sallow women and children who still gaze at me from a few of the doorways and windows, looked as if their agues were of unfailing recurrence every other day of every week; though I suppose that in winter they were somewhat less punctual. I should like to believe that Franklinton was precious to me because of its suggestion of Goldsmith's _Deserted Village_, but I cannot claim that it bore any likeness to the hamlet of the poet's fancy, even in the day when I was hungering to resemble all life to literature; and I never made it the subject of my verse, though I think now it merited as much and more. Since that time I have seen other abandoned cities, notably Pompeii and Herculaneum, but Franklinton remains of a memorable pathos and of a forlornness all the more appreciable because it had become ruin and eld amidst the young, vigorous life of a new country.