FullReads

I recall a child, dimly through the years, that lay upon the rug before the fire to read his book, with his chin resting on both his hands. His favorite hour was the winter twilight before the family came together for their supper, for at that hour the lamplighter went his rounds and threw a golden string of dots upon the street. He drove an old thin horse and he stood on the seat of the cart with up-stretched taper. But when the world grew dark the flare of the fire was enough for the child to read, for he lay close against the hearth. And as the shadows gathered in the room, there was one story chiefly, of such intensity that the excitement of it swept through his body and out into his waving legs. Perhaps its last copy has now vanished off the earth. It dealt with a deserted house on a lonely road, where chains clanked at midnight. Lights, too, seemingly not of earth, glimmered at the windows, while groans–such was the dark fancy of the author–issued from a windy tower. But there was one supreme chapter in which the hero was locked in a haunted room and saw a candle at a chink of the wall. It belonged to the villain, who nightly played there a ghostly antic to frighten honest folk from a buried treasure.

And in summer the child read on the casement of the dining-room with the window up. It was the height of a tall man from the ground, and this gave it a bit of dizziness that enhanced the pleasure. This sill could be dully reached from inside, but the approach from the outside was riskiest and best. For an adventuring mood this window was a kind of postern to the house for innocent deception, beyond the eye of both the sitting-room and cook. Sometimes it was the bridge of a lofty ship with a pilot going up and down, or it was a lighthouse to mark a channel. It was as versatile as the kitchen step-ladder which–on Thursday afternoons when the cook was out–unbent from its sober household duties and joined him as an equal. But chiefly on this sill the child read his books on summer days. His cousins sat inside on chairs, starched for company, and read safe and dimpled authors, but his were of a vagrant kind. There was one book, especially, in which a lad not much bigger than himself ran from home and joined a circus. A scolding aunt was his excuse. And the child on the sill chafed at his own happy circumstance which denied him these adventures.

In a dark room in an upper story of the house there was a great box where old books and periodicals were stored. No place this side of Cimmeria had deeper shadows. Not even the underground stall of the neighbor’s cow, which showed a gloomy window on the garden, gave quite the chill. It was only on the brightest days that the child dared to rummage in this box. The top of it was high and it was blind fumbling unless he stood upon a chair. Then he bent over, jack-knife fashion, until the upper part of him–all above the legs–disappeared. In the obscurity–his head being gone–it must have seemed that Solomon lived upon the premises and had carried out his ugly threat in that old affair of the disputed child. Then he lifted out the papers–in particular a set of Leslie’s Weekly with battle pictures of the Civil War. Once he discovered a tale of Jules Verne–a journey to the center of the earth–and he spread its chapters before the window in the dusty light.

But the view was high across the houses of the city to a range of hills where tall trees grew as a hedge upon the world. And it was the hours when his book lay fallen that counted most, for then he built poems in his fancy of ships at sea and far-off countries.