Page:Peter Whiffle (1922).djvu/99

 Otherwise, aside from various slight illnesses, his childhood was singularly devoid of incident. Because he hummed bits of tune while at play, his mother decided that he must be musical and sent him to an instructor of the piano. The first six months were drudgery for Peter but as soon as he began to read music easily the skies cleared for him. He never became a great player but he played easily and well, much better than I imagined after hearing his rather bombastic accompaniments to Clara's singing. Of books he was an omnivorous reader. He read every volume—some of them two or three times—in the family library, which included, of course, the works of Dickens, Thackeray, Wilkie Collins, Charles Reade, and Sir Walter Scott, Emerson's Essays, Bulwer-Lytton, Owen Meredith's Lucile, that long narrative poem called Nothing to Wear, Artemus Ward's Panorama, Washington Irving, Longfellow, Whittier, Thoreau, Lowell, and Hawthorne, and among the moderns, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, F. Hopkinson Smith, F. Marion Crawford, Richard Harding Davis, George W. Cable, Frank Stockton, H. C. Bunner, and Thomas Nelson Page. Peter once told me that his favourite books when he was fourteen or fifteen years old were Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins and H. B. Fuller's The Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani. The latter made a remarkable impression on him, when he first discovered it at the age of fifteen, not that he fully appreciated its ironic