At the cost of being deemed effeminate, I will add that I greatly liked the girls' stories--"Pussy Willow" and "A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life," just as I worshiped "Little Men" and "Little Women" and "An Old-Fashioned Girl." This enjoyment of the gentler side of life did not prevent my reveling in such tales of adventure as Ballantyne's stories, or Marryat's "Midshipman Easy." I suppose everybody has kinks in him, and even as a child there were books which I ought to have liked and did not.

For instance, I never cared at all for the first part of "Robinson Crusoe" (and although it is unquestionably the best part, I do not care for it now); whereas the second part, containing the adventures of Robinson Crusoe, with the wolves in the Pyrenees, and out in the Far East, simply fascinated me.

What I did like in the first part were the adventures before Crusoe finally reached his island, the fight with the Sallee Rover, and the allusion to the strange beasts at night taking their improbable bath in the ocean.

Thanks to being already an embryo zoologist, I disliked the "Swiss Family Robinson" because of the wholly impossible collection of animals met by that worthy family as they ambled inland from the wreck.

Even in poetry it was the relation of adventures that most appealed to me as a boy.