it is a pleasure to come.
The first books which vividly impressed me were, naturally, fairy tales, and
chap-books about Robert Bruce, William Wallace, and Rob Roy. At that time these
little tracts could be bought for a penny apiece. I can still see Bruce in full
armour, and Wallace in a kilt, discoursing across a burn, and Rob Roy slipping
from the soldier's horse into the stream. They did not then awaken a precocious
patriotism; a boy of five is more at home in Fairyland than in his own country.
The sudden appearance of the White Cat as a queen after her head was cut off,
the fiendish malice of the Yellow Dwarf, the strange cake of crocodile eggs
and millet seed which the mother of the Princess Frutilla made for the Fairy
of the Desert--these things, all fresh and astonishing, but certainly to be
credited, are my first memories of romance. One story of a White Serpent, with
a woodcut of that mysterious reptile, I neglected to secure, probably for want
of a penny, and I have regretted it ever since. On
