Publisher's Synopsis
The first books which vividly impressed me were, naturally, fairy tales, and chap-booksabout Robert Bruce, William Wallace, and Rob Roy. At that time these little tracts could bebought 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 thestream. They did not then awaken a precocious patriotism; a boy of five is more at home inFairyland than in his own country. The sudden appearance of the White Cat as a queenafter her head was cut off, the fiendish malice of the Yellow Dwarf, the strange cake ofcrocodile eggs and millet seed which the mother of the Princess Frutilla made for the Fairyof the Desert-these things, all fresh and astonishing, but certainly to be credited, are myfirst memories of romance. One story of a White Serpent, with a woodcut of thatmysterious reptile, I neglected to secure, probably for want of a penny, and I have regrettedit ever since. One never sees those chap books now. "The White Serpent," in spite of allresearch, remains introuvable. It was a lost chance, and Fortune does not forgive. Nobodyever interfered with these, or indeed with any other studies of ours at that time, as long asthey were not prosecuted on Sundays. "The fightingest parts of the Bible," and theApocrypha, and stories like that of the Witch of Endor, were sabbatical literature, read in ahuge old illustrated Bible. How I advanced from the fairy tales to Shakespeare, what stagesthere were on the way-for there must have been stages-is a thing that memory cannotrecover. A nursery legend tells that I was wont to arrange six open books on six chairs, andgo from one to the others, perusing them by turns. No doubt this was what people call"desultory reading," but I did not hear the criticism till later, and then too often for mycomfort. Memory holds a picture, more vivid than most, of a small boy reading the"Midsummer Night's Dream" by firelight, in a room where candles were lit, and some onetouched the piano, and a young man and a girl were playing chess. The Shakespeare was avolume of Kenny Meadows' edition; there are fairies in it, and the fairies seemed to comeout of Shakespeare's dream into the music and the firelight. At that moment I think that Iwas happy; it seemed an enchanted glimpse of eternity in Paradise; nothing resembling itremains with me, out of all the years.