best books of its kind in the world. "The Story of a Bad Boy" is of course autobiography of the more generous sort, in which incidents are combined, arranged, and idealized to make a reality more real than real life. The sequence of the events described in it bears little or no relation to the chronology of its author's own boyish life. Yet the Wahrheit of the book is vastly in excess of its Dichtung. It is simply a composed picture of vivid boyhood memories. The present writer has conferred with two survivors of the circle of Tom Bailey's Portsmouth schoolmates, and has found their memories of boyish pranks to be substantially the same as those related in the book. The private theatricals in the Bailey barn, the Fourth of July escapade, the cruises to the river's mouth, the snow fort on "Slatter's Hill" and the frigid warfare waged there, all had their prototypes in fact. Even the boyish love-affair with Miss Nelly, and the death of Binny Wallace, - the pathetic page of perfect art that lingers longest in the reader's memory, had their basis in actuality. Nor is this, indeed, very remarkable. The doings of boys the world over show a singular homogeneity of conception, and it is the typical and universal character of Tom Bailey's escapades that is their most enduring attraction.

His schoolmates' memories of Tom Bailey have one significant concurrence: to a man, and almost in the same language, they speak of a certain distinction, a magnetic reserve about him; they say he was a "marked boy." He was a good fighter, blessed with a kind of "terrier cour

age" in fistic emergencies, a cool hand at a nocturnal prank or a snowball siege, yet he seems to have gone into adventures with a certain detachment, the typical bard at a battle. In part, no doubt, these recollections of his boyish companions have taken an ex post facto coloring. Yet no one who knew him, and is endowed with a sense for the unity of personality, can doubt their essential truth.

Even in those days he was a reader, a little dreamer, and moved in a world peopled with the folk of the imagination. The passage in "The Story of a Bad Boy" describing his little hall-room in the "Nutter House," the books he found there and the use he made of them, is of the first biographic importance: —

"A washstand in the corner, a chest of carved mahogany drawers, a looking-glass in a filigreed frame, and a highbacked chair studded with brass nails like a coffin, constituted the furniture. Over the head of the bed were two oak shelves, holding perhaps a dozen books- among which were 'Theodore, or The Peruvians,' 'Robinson Crusoe,' an odd volume of 'Tristram Shandy,' Baxter's 'Saint's Rest,' and a fine English edition of the 'Arabian Nights,' with six hundred woodcuts by Harvey.

"Shall I ever forget the hour when I first overhauled these books? I do not allude especially to Baxter's 'Saint's Rest,' which is far from being a lively work for the young, but to the 'Arabian Nights,' and particularly to 'Robinson Crusoe.' The thrill that ran into my fingers' ends then has

not run out yet. Many a time did I steal up to this nest of a room, and, taking the dog's-eared volume from its shelf, glide off into an enchanted realm, where there were no lessons to get and no boys to smash my kite. In a lidless trunk in the garret I subsequently unearthed another motley collection of novels and romances, embracing the adventures of Baron Trenck, Jack Sheppard, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and Charlotte Temple - all of which I fed upon

like a bookworm.

"I never come across a copy of any of those works without feeling a certain tenderness for the yellow-haired little rascal who used to lean above the magic pages hour after hour, religiously believing every word he read, and no more doubting the reality of Sindbad the Sailor, or the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance, than he did the existence of his own grandfather."

Throughout his Portsmouth boyhood young Aldrich attended the school kept by Samuel De Merritt, a famous schoolmaster in his day, and it is pleasant to recall that after thirty years his old teacher wrote in quaint sincere phrase: "With the hundreds of pupils who have been under my instruction there is not one for whom I entertain a higher regard and a purer affection than Thomas Bailey Aldrich."

The boy's poetical education kept an equal pace. The spirit of the history-haunted town, with its hints and flavors of the ocean, its intimations of foreign shores, its refined, sad old houses, blended with his memories of