There Mencken lived for all of his life except the five years of his marriage. Mencken recalled his "Introduction to the Universe" in
Happy Days, 1880-1892, as he described Baltimore's Summer Nights' Carnival of the Order of Orioles on the evening after his third birthday: "At the instant I first became aware of the cosmos we all infest I was sitting in my mother's lap and blinking at a great burst of lights, some of them red and others green, but most of them only the bright yellow of flaring gas."
The Menckens were by any standards a closely knit family, and "Harry" and his three younger siblings, Charles, Gertrude, and August, knew a childhood fraught with the usual pleasures and perplexities of living in late-nineteenthcentury Baltimore. Mencken recalled the days of his nonage in the backyard of the Hollins Street row house: "Along with my brother Charlie, who followed me into this vale when I was but twenty months old, I spent most of my pre-school leisure in it, and found it a strange, wild land of endless discoveries and enchantments. ... In Spring we dug worms and watched for robins, in Summer we chased butterflies and stoned sparrows, and in Autumn we made bonfires of the falling leaves.
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