She had read for the
midwifery, and back in the old days could recite the bones in the body.
She let the boy read nights, sometimes even to dropping another coin
into the gas meter. Some of the books were the lewd penny ones of the
Bowery bookstands, old medical treatises, too, purchased three for a
quarter and none too nice reading for the growing boy. But there he had
also found a _Les Miserables_ and _The Confessions of St. Augustine_,
which last, if he had known it, was a rare edition, but destined for the
ash pit.
Once he read Hanscha a bit of poetry out of a furiously stained old
volume of verse, so fragrantly beautiful, to him, this bit, that it
wound around him like incense, the perfume of it going deeply and
stinging his eyes to tears:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting!
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy.
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