Our own sense of
danger, together with the imaginative effect wrought upon our excitive
minds by the dancing candlelight and the awesome shadows of the still
house, gave a strange relish to our childhood reading.
At boarding-school we found (among its other strange things) the
electric light. At nine-thirty the bell in the chapel sounded taps,
and all the lights in the school were extinguished simultaneously.
Then the master would make his rounds and find the whole school
evidently asleep in their beds. But presently doors would open and
books would be read by the light in the hall. Still we had that same
adventurous feeling in our readings, still that sweet taste of stolen
fruit.
When we were graduated from the boarding-school, put away the
proverbial childish things, and came to college, we were given a
freedom such as we had never had before. No interfering master, no
provoking lack of light to annoy us. We could burn our lamps all
night, and receive no paternal rebuke or master's chastisement. And
now, though there is none of that sweetness of stolen fruits, none of
that creeping insecurity of former readings, there is an undisturbing,
quiet secureness that makes our books more living to us.
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