My reading generally had one peculiar tone: a certain kind of mystery
was an essential ingredient in the fascination that books which I
considered interesting had for me. My earliest fairy tales were not
those unexciting stories in which the good genius appears at the
beginning of the book, endowing the hero with such an invincible
talisman that suspense is banished from the reader's mind, too well
enabled to foresee the triumph at the end; but stories of long, painful
quests after hidden treasure,--mysterious enchantments thrown around
certain persons by witch or wizard, drawing the subject in charmed
circles nearer and nearer to his royal or ruinous destiny,--strange
spells cast upon bewitched houses or places, that could be removed only
by the one hand appointed by Fate. So I pored over the misty legends of
the San Grail, and the sweet story of "The Sleeping Beauty," as my
first literature; and as the rough years of practical boyhood trooped
up to elbow my dreaming childhood out of existence, I fed the same
hunger for the hidden and mysterious with Detective-Police stories,
Captain Kidd's voyages, and wild tales of wrecks on the Spanish Main,
of those vessels of fabulous wealth that strewed the deep sea's lap
with gems (so the stories ran) of lustre almost rare enough to light
the paths to their secret hiding-places.
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