father's office. In this office are some objects of my boyhood reverence-an old engraved portrait of Abbot, the Archbishop of Canterbury; an old coat of arms bearing the inscription, "By the Name of Abbot" (this was an early spelling of the name with one t, a spelling followed by my grandfather, so that he was Jacob Abbot, with one t, while my father was Jacob Abbott, with two t's); an old sword worn by my grandmother's father in the battle of Bunker Hill, in which he was a captain of a Colonial company; and a cane presented to my grandfather, I believe, by one of the farm hands in Weld, bearing, curiously and ingeniously carved, the inscription :

From this cane my father later derived the title which he gave to the old homestead-"Fewacres."

My ideas of my grandfather's business are very vague. He has, I believe, something to do with buying and selling timber lands. The house is heated by open fires and stoves, and the attic bedrooms are not heated at all. Hotwater bottles are unknown. There is a warming-pan; but it is reserved for invalids. Ugh! how cold it is going upstairs and getting between the cold sheets with the thermometer twenty degrees below zero outside! It is characteristic of my grandfather to forbid the children-my brothers are with me there at times-to go through the diningroom when the servants, man and maid, are at their meals. If we want to go to the kitchen or woodshed, we must go out of doors a valuable lesson in consideration and courtesy to servants. Some other lessons of practical wisdom and counsel condensed by him into aphorisms have been invaluable guides to conduct in my after life. Three, particularly, I recall :

the sitting-room table, in which a picture illustrating the text, "Why beholdest thou the mote which is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam which is in thine own eye?" Two men are portrayed standing face to face with a beam protruding from the eye of one of them. To the early impression produced by this picture I attribute in part my lifelong hostility to literalism in the interpretation of the Bible.

There is no running water in the house, and of course there are no bath-rooms. There is a well of delicious spring water just outside the kitchen, and water for washing is caught in hogsheads from the roof. I suppose these must have been breeding-places for mosquitoes, and yet, curiously enough, I do not at all connect mosquitoes with my grandfather's house. There are no screens in the windows. On Saturday nights we boys take our baths in the kitchen, in the movable washtubs. How the old folks took theirs I do not recall that I ever knew. They had their warmed bedrooms downstairs, which probably served their purpose. In the diningroom chimney is a big brick oven. On Saturday night hot coals are shoveled into this oven, and then the earthen crock of beans is put in and left there overnight. Here, too, is the brown bread baked-real brown bread, such as can never, apparently, be produced outside of New England, as real fried chicken cannot be produced outside the Southern States.

Now I am at Little Blue, School opposite my grandfather's. Whether I was first at my grandfather's and then moved over to the school, or was first at the school, then moved over to my grandfather's, I have no idea. These reminiscences are like the impressions of a dream, and succeed each other without coherence or continuity.

66

There is an epidemic of animal magnetism, which in our day would be called hypnotism. It runs its brief course and then disappears, but for six weeks is a dominating fashion. There is one boy who is peculiarly susceptible to the influence, whatever it was, or is, and another boy who has peculiar power as an operator." Often the victim gets pathetically angry when his tormentor, apparently without previous preparation, tells him what he must do and what he must not do, and he is powerless to resist. There is a young man from the village who is supposed by us boys to be a past-master in this curious art. Always desirous of investigating new phenomena

and having a share in new experiences, I apply to this young man to operate on me, and I am quite ready to submit myself to his influence for the sake of finding out what it is. So I take my seat and obey his directions, while he makes the passes which are supposed to be needful to put me to sleep. Then he places his thumb on the bridge of my nose and tells me that I cannot open my eyes; this I instantly proceed to do and to look him serenely in the face. He turns from me with the contemptuous remark that I am not a good subject.

I never have been. I have passed through some exciting experiences in great congregations in revival meetings, and in great crowds that were not congregations and not remotely resembling revival meetings, and I have heard many fervid and famous orators; but I have never been swept off my feet by either orator or crowd; I have never lost my consciousness of self or my self-mastery. I wonder why it is. I am not conscious of being either especially strong willed or especially self-possessed. And, so far from having peculiar resisting power, I always wish to agree with my fellow-men if I can possibly find a way to do so without disagreeing with myself.

What did we study at Little Blue ? I have no notion. I suppose we must have studied what boys study nowadays-grammar, spelling, writing, history, arithmetic. But I recall nothing of it at all. My first remembrance of grammar is my study of the Latin grammar at a later date, which gave me, so far as I now can see, whatever knowledge I possess of the structure of language. It is perhaps for that reason that I regret to see Latin dropped out of any curriculum. The English language is a composite, and has no architectural structure such as characterizes the Latin. I have a vague remembrance of declamation: "Marco Bozzaris," "The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck," and the like; and one poor boy who was struck with stage fright and never got beyond the first line without bursting into tears and retiring in disgrace. I remember thinking even then, with some indignation, that punishing him for his failure was a very poor way to cure him. of his fright.

Modern games were either absolutely or relatively unknown. There was no lawn tennis; and, as I remember it, neither baseball nor football. "Two old cat" and "three old cat" were common, but I judge that I never

made a success at any game of ball, since the sobriquet "butter fingers" was given to me. I could keep in or near the front line in a boyish race; and I had some success in wrestling, not by reason of any muscular strength, but because I was spry and slippery. I never owned a gun, and I have not yet quite got over my boyhood feeling, probably derived from my guardians, that a gun. is not a boy's toy. This impression is confirmed by an incident in my oldest son's life. He went, at the age of thirteen, to spend the summer of 1872 with my father and my two aunts, Sallucia and Clara. Before he went his grandfather sent him a paper which he was to sign, containing certain conditions to which he was to agree, in order to be admitted to Fewacres University." Among these conditions was the following: "He is not to go gunning with anybody, since Aunts Sallucia and Clara, though very capable persons in some respects, are not properly qualified to take care of a boy with a charge of shot in his side or with half his face blown away." I never learned to box and never had muscle enough to learn. Later, in college, I took some fencing lessons, and have always regretted that they were unavoidably discontinued.

Among the impressions which my school life left upon me was one, insignificant in itself, but significant in its effect. One Sunday afternoon, as we boys were starting for church, in putting on my overcoat I threw it over my head, struck a vase upon the mantelpiece and dashed it to the floor, shattering it into a hundred pieces. The disaster which I had caused would probably have been sufficient of itself to prevent a repetition of that particular form of carelessness. The teacher, who would simply have rebuked me, if my heedless act had done no damage, sent me to my bed to reflect for the afternoon and the night upon the enormity of the crime, which was enormous only because of the disaster which followed it. I knew then, as I know now, that I was punished, not for what I did, but for the consequences of what I did. I have never got over the sense of the injustice of that act. justice of that act. Perhaps I ought to be grateful to my teacher, though I am not, for teaching me the lesson and preventing me in after life, when I had children of my own, from measuring their conduct by the consequences which flowed from it, not by the motives which inspired it.

My favorite sport from my earliest recol

lections was trout fishing. There was an occasional trout in my father's brook. Two miles across the hills was a larger and much better brook, with a cascade, at the foot of which was a pool where one might always see a trout, though not always catch him. But the joy of life was Alder Brook, twelve or fifteen miles away. To drive over the hills to this brook, build a rude camp, sleep on boughs, cook our meals, and come back with a hundred brook trout apiece was an experience to look forward to with eagerness and back upon with rejoicing memory. this was later, when, with my brothers, I came from college to Farmington for my summer vacation.

But

We made our own fish-lines, twisting and double-twisting and triple-twisting the silk, ganged on the hooks, bought the long bamboo poles and cut them up, and out of them made our own jointed fishing-rods. We always cleaned our fish ourselves. It was the law of the sport that our fun should not make work for others which we ourselves could do. Whether this law was imposed on us by my wise Aunt Clara or was self-imposed I do not know. I am sure, whoever suggested it, we gladly accepted the suggestion and made it our own, and that we enjoyed our sport the more because it cost but little to any one else. The fishing was not with flies but with worms dug from the garden, or, if the supply of worms ran short, with grasshoppers. This recalls one of the fishing stories with which we were accustomed to enliven our conversation on the trip:

John, John, where you're going?
Fishin'.

What you got in your mouth?
Worms for bait.

It is with some hesitation that I turn from these reminiscences of my childhood life to recall my impressions of my childhood personality. A man's judgment of himself is rarely accurate; still less so his judgment of what he was as a boy. For it is the unusual experiences that remain in his memory, and it is the usual experiences which interpret his character.

What I see, as I look back through the more than threescore years to the dim mental photograph left in my mind of myself, is a feeble boy, somewhat under the average in height, very much under the average in weight and strength, fairly good in swimming, skating, climbing, and tramping, but quite unable to hold his own in the rougher

sports of the boys, somewhat solitary, somewhat a recluse, and naturally timid. And yet I could not have been quite a coward, for I remember, even now with a curious sense of pride, that when a big bully of a boy (probably not so much of a brute as I now imagine him to have been) hectored me beyond endurance, I challenged him to a fight, and we retired behind the barn, with a small group of boys as onlookers, and fought a fisticuff duel. Doubtless I got much the worse of our encounter, for I cannot conceive that my fist would have hurt anything much bigger than a house-fly, but at least I won his respect, and the bullying stopped. I have never been for peace-at-any-price as a man, and I was not as a boy.

My impressions of my feebleness of physique is borne out by some of my mother's letters, which indicate that I was both a delicate and an active child from the cradle. One extract from a letter dated April, 1838, when I was two years and a half old, may serve to indicate something of both my health and my temperament:

Our little Lyman has been more delicate since his illness, subject to a cough which occasions care and anxiety, mostly because it has increased his former difficulties. The Dr. still encourages us to look for an entire cure, but says he will need all a mother's watchfulness for two years or more, and must not be allowed all the liberty he desires in exercises, such as walking, running, etc. He is such an active child that it is difficult to restrain him, but he seems at times, from his sufferings, to be fully conscious that he cannot do all he wants.

This chapter would be wholly inadequate without a picture, be it ever so fragmentary, of the religious influences which surrounded me in my childhood and their effect upon my religious character.

Every one went to church-every one with the exception of two or three families whom I looked upon with a kind of mysterious awe, as I might have looked upon a family without visible means of support and popularly suspected of earning a livelihood by counterfeiting or some similar lawless practice. The church itself was an old-fashioned brick Puritan meeting-house, equally free from architectural ornament without and from decoration within. The pews had been painted white; for some reason the paint had not dried, and the congregation, to protect their garments, had spread down upon the seats and backs of the pews newspapers, generally religious. When the paint at length dried the newspapers were pulled off, leaving the