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 though not over five, sported long and ragged trousers and flannel shirts and wore their hair clipped and frowzy. These boys went by the house with fishing-rods or, in the fall, with baskets to gather hickory-nuts. When they saw Harold in the yard they yelled, Sissy! and Baby girl! at him until he retreated sobbing to the shelter of Auntie Persia's skirts.

When he was seven, Elliot Sanderson, George Prewett's attorney, arrived, and engaged in a long conference with his aunt, the immediate result of which was the purchase of a few suits proper for a small boy, and a hair-cut. Another result was the subsequent arrival of a tall young man with glasses, solemner, on the whole, than his Aunt Sadi, who was to act, Harold learned, as his tutor. At the age of ten, Harold could read and write and do his sums, and knew something of geography, although it cannot be said that he held imaginatively any real sense of this big world. He himself had never been farther than a neighbouring village, whither he was occasionally permitted to drive with his aunt.

There were piles of old bound magazines in the house, Harper's and Godey's and Putnam's, and a few other books besides, left behind by an earlier occupant, Thaddeus of Warsaw and The Scottish Chiefs, Pride and Prejudice, Cranford, Ivanhoe, Pendennis, David Copperfield, The Woman in White, the Poems of Ossian, the Poems of Owen Meredith, The Initials, Charles Auchester, Noth-