He was a physician, and in his youth he had lived for a long time upon the coast of Africa; he had a collection of natural history specimens almost as valuable and varied as any found in a city museum.

His wonderful things captivated me: the rare and exquisite shells, amulets and wooden weapons that still retained their exotic odor, with which I became so surfeited later, and indescribably beautiful butterflies under glass enchanted me.
He lived in our neighborhood and I visited him often.

To get to his cabinets, it was necessary to go through his garden where thorn-apples and cacti grew abundantly, and where they kept a gray parrot, brought from Gaboon, whose vocabulary consisted of words learnt from the negroes.
And when my old uncle spoke of Senegal, of Goree, and of Guinea, the music of these names intoxicated me, and conveyed to me vaguely something of the sad languor of the dark continent.

My uncle predicted that I would become a great naturalist,--but he was as mistaken as were all those others who foretold my future; indeed he struck farther from the centre than any one else; he did not understand that my liking for natural history was no more than a temporary and erratic excursion of my unformed mind; he could not know that the cold glass and the formal, rigid arrangements of dead science had not power to hold me for long..