and Heaven only knows how delighted I was to find myself in such society!"
"How much of our poetry," it has been asked, "owes its start to Spenser, when the Fairy Queen was a household book, and lay in the parlor window-seat?" And how many brilliant fancies have emanated from those same window-seats, which Montaigne so keenly despised? There, where the smallest child could climb with ease, lay piled up in a corner, within the reach of his little hands, the few precious volumes which perhaps comprised the literary wealth of the household. Those were not days when over-indulgence and a multiplicity of books robbed reading of its healthy zest. We know that in the window-seat of Cowley's mother's room lay a copy of the Fairy Queen, which to her little son was a source of unfailing delight, and Pope has recorded the ecstasy with which, as a lad, he pored over this wonderful poem; but then neither Cowley nor Pope had the advantage of following Oliver Optic through the slums of New York, or living with some adventurous "boy hunters" in the jungles of Central Africa. On the other hand, there is a deli-
