Remarks | Page 3

school house and plugged up the knot-hole, so that I could not work my
toe into it and thus refresh my memory.
Then the large red-headed boy, who had not formed the knot-hole habit
went to the head of the class and remained there.
After I grew larger, my parents sent me to a military school. That is
where I got the fine military learning and stately carriage that I still

wear.
My room was on the second floor, and it was very difficult for me to
leave it at night, because the turnkey locked us up at 9 o'clock every
evening. Still, I used to get out once in a while and wander around in
the starlight. I did not know yet why I did it, but I presume it was a
kind of somnambulism. I would go to bed thinking so intently of my
lessons that I would get up and wander away, sometimes for miles, in
the solemn night.
One night I awoke and found myself in a watermelon patch. I was
never so ashamed in my life. It is a very serious thing to be awakened
so rudely out of a sound sleep, by a bull dog, to find yourself in the
watermelon vineyard of a man with whom you are not acquainted. I
was not on terms of social intimacy with this man or his dog. They did
not belong to our set. We had never been thrown together before.
After that I was called the great somnambulist and men who had
watermelon conservatories shunned me. But it cured me of my
somnambulism. I have never tried to somnambule any more since that
time.
There are other little incidents of my schooldays that come trooping up
in my memory at this moment, but they were not startling in their
nature. Mine is but the history of one who struggled on year after year,
trying to do better, but most always failing to connect. The boys of
Boston would do well to study carefully my record and then--do
differently.

Recollections of Noah Webster.
Mr. Webster, no doubt, had the best command of language of any
American author prior to our day. Those who have read his ponderous
but rather disconnected romance known as "Websters Unabridged
Dictionary, or How One Word Led on to Another." will agree with me
that he was smart. Noah never lacked for a word by which to express

himself. He was a brainy man and a good speller.
It would ill become me at this late day to criticise Mr. Webster's great
work--a work that is now in almost every library, school-room and
counting house in the land. It is a great book. I do believe that had Mr.
Webster lived he would have been equally fair in his criticism of my
books.
I hate to compare my own works with those of Mr. Webster, because it
may seem egotistical in me to point out the good points in my literary
labors; but I have often heard it said, and so do not state it solely upon
my own responsibility, that Mr. Webster's book does not retain the
interest of the reader all the way through.
He has tried to introduce too many characters, and so we cannot follow
them all the way through. It is a good book to pick up and while away
an idle hour with, perhaps, but no one would cling to it at night till the
fire went out, chained to the thrilling plot and the glowing career of its
hero.
Therein consists the great difference between Mr. Webster and myself.
A friend of mine at Sing Sing once wrote me that from the moment he
got hold of my book, he never left his room till he finished it. He
seemed chained to the spot, he said, and if you can't believe a convict,
who is entirely out of politics, who in the name of George Washington
can you believe?
Mr. Webster was most assuredly a brilliant writer, and I have
discovered in his later editions 118,000 words, no two of which are
alike. This shows great fluency and versatility, it is true, but we need
something else. The reader waits in vain to be thrilled by the author's
wonderful word painting. There is not a thrill in the whole tome. I had
heard so much of Mr. Webster that when I read his book I confess I
was disappointed. It is cold, methodical and dispassionate in the
extreme.
As I said, however, it is a good book to pick up for the purpose of
whiling away an idle moment, and no one should start out on a long

journey without Mr. Webster's tale in his pocket. It has broken the
monotony of many a tedious trip for