On the other hand, Nicholas Nickleby and
Dombey and Son were so full of extraordinary characters,
unexpected wit, outbursts of beautiful rhetoric, and other
wonderful things, that their author appealed to me as something
more than a human being. And yet deep down in my heart I
enjoyed Thackeray more than I did Dickens, It was at the East Side
branch of the Young Men's Hebrew Association that I obtained
my books. It was a sort of university settlement in which educated
men and women from up-town acted as "workers." The advice
these would give me as to my reading, their kindly manner, their
native English, and, last but not least, the flattering way in which
they would speak of my intellectual aspirations, led me to spend
many an hour in the place. The great thing was to hear these
American-born people speak their native tongue and to have them
hear me speak it. It was the same as in the case of the chat I had
with the son of my Irish landlady. Every time I had occasion to
spend five or ten minutes in their company I would seem to be
conscious of a perceptible improvement in my English
Some days I would be so carried away by my reading that I never
opened my arithmetic.
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