Page:Letters of Life.djvu/41

Rh of that fearful fiction-book seemed to me too strong to be resisted.

Two immense stacks of chimneys passed through this garret to their outlet in the roof, where was also a scuttle-door attained by a flight of stairs, whither I mounted and peered out when ambition so moved. In one of those chimneys was a closet, where the ropes and pulleys of the great roasting-jack hissed and sputtered when put in motion by the fires below. I remember, on one occasion, opening the door of that dark enclosure, and saying to a little girl who had come up stairs with me that "Jack lived there." At the sound of the clamor within, her eyes enlarged, and, fleet as a deer, she fled from the house. My shouts of explanation were unheeded. The joke lost me a playmate for that day. On reflection, it seemed a wicked invention, at which my conscience was troubled.

This capacious apartment also contained remnants and vestiges of my father's military life. Much time did I spend among these. The stories that I had heard of battles while seated on the paternal knee, gave life and voice to every relic. Pouches of shot, and bullets, and flints, and the large twisted powder-horns, were intensely interesting to me.

I did not feel inclined, like Desdemona, to "weep at what a soldier suffers," but forthwith girded myself with the bright brass-hilted sword, and put my tiny hands upon the cumbrous pistols, and toiled in vain