I cannot understand just how I came to know of the books, but I suppose it was through the contemporary criticism which I was then beginning to read, wherever I could find it, in the magazines and newspapers; and I could not say why I thought it would be very ‘comme il faut’ to like them.  Probably the literary fine world, which is always rubbing shoulders with the other fine world, and bringing off a little of its powder and perfume, was then dawning upon me, and I was wishing to be of it, and to like the things that it liked; I am not so anxious to do it now.  But if this is true, I found the books better than their friends, and had many a heartache from their pathos, many a genuine glow of purpose from their high import, many a tender suffusion from their sentiment.  I dare say I should find their pose now a little old-fashioned.  I believe it was rather full of sighs, and shrugs and starts, expressed in dashes, and asterisks, and exclamations, but I am sure that the feeling was the genuine and manly sort which is of all times and always the latest wear.  Whatever it was, it sufficed to win my heart, and to identify me with whatever was most romantic and most pathetic in it.  I read ‘Dream Life’ first—­though the ’Reveries of a Bachelor’ was written first, and I believe is esteemed the better book —­and ‘Dream Life’ remains first in my affections.  I have now little notion what it was about, but I love its memory.  The book is associated especially in my mind with one golden day of Indian summer, when I carried it into the woods with me, and abandoned myself to a welter of emotion over its page.  I lay, under a crimson maple, and I remember how the light struck through it and flushed the print with the gules of the foliage.  My friend was away by this time on one of his several absences in the Northwest, and I was quite alone in the absurd and irrelevant melancholy with which I read myself and my circumstances into the book.  I began to read them out again in due time, clothed with the literary airs and graces that I admired in it, and for a long time I imitated Ik Marvel in the voluminous letters I wrote my friend in compliance with his Shakespearean prayer: 

     “To Milan let me hear from thee by letters,
     Of thy success in love, and what news else
     Betideth here in absence of thy friend;
     And I likewise will visit thee with mine.”

Milan was then presently Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and Verona was our little village; but they both served the soul of youth as well as the real places would have done, and were as really Italian as anything else in the situation was really this or that.  Heaven knows what gaudy sentimental parade we made in our borrowed plumes, but if the travesty had kept itself to the written word it would have been all well enough.  My misfortune was to carry it into print when I began to write a story, in the Ik Marvel manner, or rather to compose it in type at the case, for that was what