NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE]
Here was a playground for boys of imaginative but not too destructive
proclivities, such as the world hardly furnishes elsewhere. But much
of my enjoyment of it I ascribe to my friend Eddy. My conversation
with no person since then has rivalled the profundity and importance
of my communings with his sympathetic soul. We not only discussed our
future destinies and philosophical convictions, but we located in
these delicious retreats the various worlds which we purposed to
explore and inhabit during the next few hundred years. Here we passed
through by anticipation all our future experiences. Sometimes we were
accompanied by other boys; but then our visits lost their distinction;
we merely had good times in the ordinary way of boys; we were robber
barons, intrenched in our strongholds, and attacked by other robbers;
or we ran races, or held other trials of strength and activity, or we
set snares for the bright-colored fishes which lurked in some of the
fountains. The grounds were occasionally invaded by gangs of Italian
boys, between whom and ourselves existed an irreconcilable feud. We
could easily thrash them in the Anglo-Saxon manner, with nature's
weapons; but they would ambush us and assail us with stones; and once
one of them struck at me with a knife, which was prevented from
entering my side only by the stout leather belt which I chanced to
wear. We denounced these assassins to the smiling custode of the
grounds, and he promised, smilingly, to bar the entrance to them
thenceforth; but he was a smiling deceiver; our enemies came just the
same.
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