Chapter 3 AN AMERICAN EDUCATION

Whether on account of the escapade related in the preceding chapter or from influences of which I knew, and still know, nothing, it was decided not long after that I should go to New York to attend a public school there and live with my eldest brother, who, being twenty-five years older than myself, and childless, had always treated me with an indulgence which was perhaps due in part to the rigor of my father's rule, and in part to his fondness for me, of which I retain some early recollections in his annual visits home.

My brother's wife, a fellow townswoman of ours, and a marriage-convert to the Seventh Day Baptist Church, was one of the most disagreeable persons I have ever had to deal with, and hysterical to a degree of occasional insanity. She had adopted the severities of our Puritanic system with aggravations. The Sabbath under her rule became a day of preatonement for the sins I was foreordained to commit. Dinner, as was the general custom in those days, was at noon, but on Saturday I had none till I had committed to heart and recited a portion of Scripture, and as the mental apathy of the period still weighed on me, the task of the Seventh Day was a sarcastic comment on the divine rest, in commemoration of which it was supposed to be instituted, and it made me grateful for the Sunday, which I generally passed in mechanical occupations in the workshop of my third brother, Paul, the foreman of the department in which the minor articles of the works were made, steam-gauges, models of inventions, etc., and as I had my share of the family manual dexterity, I found interest enough in the workshop. As my brothers always observed the Sabbath rigidly, they attracted around them a few of the New England mechanics who were "Sabbath-keepers" and mostly related to us, and so we had a small congregation and a church of our way of thinking.

The school to which I was sent was one of those founded by the Public School Society, a voluntary association of well-to-do citizens, who, in the absence of any municipal initiative, had organized themselves for the encouragement and support of primary education. As they were originally excluded from the management of the schools, the politicians, finding this a new field of operations and partisan activity, presently established the rival system of the municipal schools called "ward schools." At that time the political intrigues of the Catholic Church for the control of the public school system had just begun. The Public School Society had been organized for the free and non-sectarian education of all children unable to meet the expense of education in the private schools, and received subsidies from the municipality. Not only were all children under sixteen admitted to these schools without any fees, but the books, stationery, and all other material necessary were furnished gratuitously, and those who were shoeless were even provided with shoes, the only requisites being cleanliness and regular attendance. The direction was rigidly non-sectarian. The trustees were unpaid, and they comprised many of the leading citizens interested in popular education. They had built for their service sixteen schoolhouses in New York, and in each of these there were on an average a thousand children. The schoolhouses, of three stories, had a primary department for such children as were too young to be taught their letters or were not yet able to read and write, and to them the basement was given, the second story to the older girls, and the upper to the boys. The teaching for the boys' department was limited to the elements of arithmetic, elementary algebra, astronomy, and geometry, but within these limits the education was thorough, and all who went through it were qualified for places in offices or counting-rooms. The day was always opened by the reading of Scripture and prayer by the principal or one of the assistants, and this practice was made the ground of attack by the Catholic politicians, who objected to the Protestant Bible, all the school-books being already expurgated of every passage to which the bishops objected.

As our assistant principal was a Catholic, and often had to read the chapter, there could have been little harm done even to a Catholic pupil, but the political pressure was sufficient to induce the corporation of the city to adopt the political or "ward school" system, controlled by the politicians, and the new schools, one of which was or was to be established in each ward of the city, began to run an active opposition to the society schools, which they eventually drove out of existence.

At the time I was in the school, the interference of politics had just begun to make itself felt in the schools, but the corporation had not the courage to introduce its system on a large scale by supplanting en bloc the society schools, which might have made a political revolt; the Irish Catholic influence was still a feeble one, and the population at large was hardly aware of its tendency, but as the ward schools were gradually brought into active competition with the society schools the children were drawn off from the latter by various inducements and pressure on the parents. Each of our schools had four paid teachers-the principal, an assistant, and a junior and a senior monitor; and the elder pupils were employed in the instruction of the younger and in the preservation of order in school and in the school yard during the intermissions in which the gymnastics were enforced. My mental apathy must have been still very profound, for I remember that it often happened that when a question which had passed other pupils came to me in the class, the senior monitor used to address me, "Well, stupid, what do you say?" I evidently was the most stupid boy in the class-nothing seemed to penetrate my mental dullness, but, having grown tall and strong for my age, I was often made "yard monitor," to keep order during the physical training.

There was a gang of young ruffians, street boys, who used to hang around the school gates and maltreat the stragglers and even the boys in the yard, if the gate was left open, and I remember one day three or four of them invading the school-yard after I had dismissed the boys to go upstairs at the end of the intermission, thinking that they would have a fine game with the monitor. One made a pretext to quarrel with me, and, gripping me round the body, called to his companions to go and get some stones to pound me on the head with, this being the approved manner of the young roughs of New York. Finding that I could not extricate myself from his grip, I dragged him to the wall, and, catching him by the ears, beat his head against the rough stones until he dropped insensible, when, to the astonishment of his comrades, instead of stamping on him and finishing him at once, I ran upstairs as fast as my legs could carry me, so that when they came with their stones they had only their champion to carry out.

On the holidays there were generally stone-fights between the boys of our quarter and one of the adjoining quarters, and I shall carry to my grave the scars on my head of cuts received in one of these field combats, in which I refused to follow my party in flight, and took the onslaught of the whole vanguard of the enemy, armed with stones, and had my head pounded yellow, being only saved from worse by the intervention of the men of the vicinity. This fight gave me the unmerited reputation of courage and fighting power, and I was thereafter unmolested by the young roughs, though, in fact, I was timid to a degree and only stood my ground from nervous obstinacy; I never provoked a quarrel, and only revolted against a bully when the position became intolerable. I can remember the amazement of a companion older than myself, who had been in the habit of bullying me freely, until one day he went too far and I took him by the collar and shook and swung him till he was dizzy and begged for mercy, for of downright pugilistics I knew nothing, and a deliberate blow in the face with my fist in cold blood was a measure too brutal to enter into my mind.

The dreariness of this portion of my life was beyond description. The oppression of my sister-in-law at home, the severities of the teachers at school, and the exclusion from the influences of nature, in which I had so long lived without restraint, resulted in an attack of nostalgia which, when the coming of the first wildflowers brought it to a crisis, induced my brother to send me home.

My brother was attached to me, but the jealousy of his wife towards anybody who seemed to have any influence over him made it impossible for him to show any feeling even to me, for it brought on furious attacks of hysteria, to appease which he had sometimes to resort to humiliating devices. One day she became so excited that she fell into an extreme prostration and declared that she was dying. She had every indication, indeed, of approaching dissolution, and made her last dispositions, when my brother Charles, who was the family physician, seeing that the danger was real, assured her husband that unless some diversion of her humor was effected she would die. He advised exciting her jealousy, and her husband, accordingly, as if taking her dispositions for his conduct after her death, asked her what she thought of his marrying, in that contingency, a certain lady, whose name he mentioned, whereupon she rose in her bed in such a rage at the suggestion (the woman being her especial detestation) that she threw off all the symptoms of illness, and the next day went about the house as usual. This cure proved a grave misfortune to the whole family.

In spite of my aversion I was sent back to New York the next autumn for another winter's schooling. I landed from the steamer at the foot of Cortlandt Street two or three days after a great fire in New York, and I saw the ruins still smoking and the firemen playing on them. My baggage-a biscuit box, with my scanty wardrobe and a bag of hickory-nuts for my city cousins-I carried on my shoulders and walked the length of the city, my brother living in what was then farther New York, in Seventh Street, near the East River. At that time Fourteenth Street was the extreme limit of the city's growth, except for a few scattering residences. Beyond, and, on the East River side, even most of what lay beyond Seventh Street, was unreclaimed land. I sailed my toy boats on the salt marshes where Tompkins Square now is, and I used to shoot, botanize, and hunt for crystals all over the island beyond Thirty-Second Street, the land being sparsely inhabited. I discovered a little wild cactus growing freely amongst the rocks, and carried a handkerchief full of it home, getting myself well pricked by the spines, but to my botanical enthusiasm this was nothing in view of the discovery. Only here and there patches of arable land maintained small farmhouses, but the greater part of the surface of Manhattan Island was composed of a poor grazing land, interspersed with rolling ledges of bare granite, on which were visible what were then known as "diluvial scratches," which my brother Charles, who was an ardent naturalist, explained to me as the grooves made by the irruption of the deluge, which carried masses of stone across the broad ledges and left these scratches, then held widely as testimony to the actuality of the great deluge of Genesis. I think that we had to wait for Agassiz to show us that the "diluvial scratches" were really glacial abrasions, caused by the great glacier which came down the valley of the Hudson and went to sea off Sandy Hook. At this time my brother was making conchology his special study, and many holidays we spent on the harbor, dredging for shells, and great was our joy when he discovered a new species, which was named after him by the Lyceum of Natural History of New York.

The following year my fifth brother, Jacob, on leaving college, took charge of a school in the centre of New York State, built by the Sabbatarian community at large, in De Ruyter, a village of which many of the inhabitants were Sabbatarians, and it was decided that I should go there to follow my studies in preparation for college. I was to "board out" a debt which an uncle owed to my eldest brother, and which was uncollectible in any other way, and there I made my first acquaintance with semi-independent life, exchanging a home for a dormitory and a boarding-house. My uncle was to supply also my bedding, the academy being provided with bedsteads; but he was a heedless man, and I remember that I had to sleep six weeks on the bed-cords, with my wearing apparel as my only covering, before he awoke to the fact that I had a prepaid claim on him for mattress and bedding. But we were on the edge of a great forest, and in the almost primeval woodland I found compensation for many discomforts, and what time my tasks spared me was spent wandering there. The persistent apathy which had oppressed me for so many years still refused to lift, and my stupidity in learning was such that my brother threatened to send me home as a disgrace to the family. I had taken up Latin again, algebra, and geometry, and, though I was up by candlelight in the morning, and rarely put my books away till after ten at night except for meals, it was impossible for me to construe half of the lesson in Virgil, and the geometry was learned by rote. I at length gave up exercise to gain time for study, and my despairing struggles were misery. I was then fourteen, and in the seventh year of this darkness, and it seemed to me hopeless.

What happened I know not, but about the middle of the first term the mental fog broke away suddenly, and before the term ended I could construe the Latin in less time than it took to recite it, and the demonstrations of Euclid were as plain and clear as a fairy story. My memory came back so completely that I could recite long poems after a single reading, and no member of the class passed a more brilliant examination at the end of the term than I. At the end of the second term I could recite the whole of Legendre's geometry, plane and spherical, from beginning to end, without a question, and the class examination was recorded as the most remarkable which the academy had witnessed for many years. I have never been able to conceive an explanation of this curious phenomenon, which I record only as of possible interest to some one interested in psychology. Unfortunately, the academy failed to meet the expenses, and at the end of my second term the students dispersed to their homes, I going with great regret, for I enjoyed intensely this life on the edge of a large natural forest, through which ran a trout brook, and in which such wild woodland creatures as still survived our civilization were tolerably abundant. Amongst my fellow-students at De Ruyter was Charles Dudley Warner, with whom I contracted a friendship which survives in activity, though our paths in life have been since widely separated. I recall him as a sensitive, poetical boy,-almost girlish in his delicacy of temperament,-and showing the fine esprit which has made him one of the first of our humorists. His "Being a Boy" is a delightful and faithful record of the existence of a genuine New England boy, which will remain to future generations as a paleontological record when the race of them is extinct, if indeed it be not so already.

Returning to Schenectady, I found that the family had begun to discuss the future of my career, which had arrived at the point of divergences. My father, who had no opinion of the utility of advanced education for boys in our station, was tenacious in his intention to have me in his workshop, where he needed more apprentices, but my mother was still more obstinate in hers that I should have the education; and in the decision the voices of my brothers were too potent not to hold the casting vote. In the stern, Puritanical manner of the family, I had been more or less the enfant gaté of all its members, except my brother Paul, the third of my brothers, who, coming into the knowledge of domestic affairs at the time when the family was at its greatest straits, had expressed himself bitterly at my birth, over the imprudence of our parents' increasing their obligations when they were unable to provide for the education of the children they had already, and had always retained for me a little of the bitterness of those days. On the whole, the vote of the family council was for the education. My own wishes were hardly consulted, for I differed from both opinions, having an intense enthusiasm for art, to which I wished to devote myself.

The collective decision, in which my father and myself were alike overruled, was that I should go to Union College, in Schenectady, as the collegiate education was supposed to be a facilitation for whatever occupation I might afterwards decide on. This was, so far as I was concerned, a fatal error, and one of a kind far too common in New England communities, where education is estimated by the extent of the ground it covers, without relation to the superstructure to be raised on it. I had always been a greedy reader of books, and especially of histories and the natural sciences,-everything in the vegetable or animal world fascinated me,-and I had no ambition for academic honors, nor did I ever acquire any, but I passionately desired a technical education in the arts, and the decision of the family deferred the first steps in that direction for years, and precisely those years when facility of hand is most completely acquired and enthusiasm against difficulties is strongest-the years when, if ever, the artist is made.

That one of the gravest difficulties in our modern civilized life is the excessive number of liberally educated young men whose professional ambitions are, and can be, given no outlet, is now well recognized, and of these, many no doubt, like myself, are diverted from a natural bent to follow one which has no natural leading or sequence. It was very possible for a clever man three hundred years ago to learn all that science could show him without interference with the acquisition of the special knowledge required to fit him for the attainment of eminence in a technical study, or the technical mastery in the working it out, but now the range of a liberal education is so great that those who are required to take respectable rank in a specialty must devote themselves exclusively to it, during the years in which alone technical mastery is possible of acquirement. There will always be many to whom the devotion to study for study's sake is invincible, but the ranks of the brain-workers are so overcrowded that it is a great pity to force into them a man or woman who would be content to be a worker in another and humbler line, especially in those of the manual occupations which bring their happiness in the following of them. In my case the result of the imposed career was a disaster; I was diverted from the only occupation to which I ever had a recognizable calling, and ultimately I drifted into journalism, as the consequence of a certain literary facility developed by the exercises of the college course. The consequences were the graver that I was naturally too much disposed to a vagrant life; and the want of a dominant interest in my occupation led to indulgence, on every occasion that offered in later life, of the tendency to wander. I came out of the experience with a divided allegiance, enough devotion to letters to make it a satisfaction to occupy myself with them, but too much interest in art to be able to abandon it entirely. Before entering college, art was a passion, but when, at the age of twenty, the release gave me the liberty to throw myself into painting, the finer roots of enthusiasm were dead, and I became only a dilettante, for the years when one acquires the mastery of hand and will which make the successful artist were past.

It was decided that I should continue my preparation for college in the Lyceum of my native town, a quaint octagonal building in which the students were seated in two tiers of stalls, the partitions between which were on radii drawn from a centre on the master's desk, so that nothing the pupil did escaped his supervision. The larger boys, some of whom were over sixteen, were in a basement similarly arranged with a single tier of desks, and I earned my instruction by supervising this room. I had here full authority so far as the maintenance of order was concerned and kept it, though some of the pupils were older than myself. I remember that one of them, about my own age and presumed strength, but himself convinced of his superiority, repeated some act which I had reprimanded him for, and as I knew that to allow it to pass unpunished was to put an end to my authority and position, yet did not feel competent or authorized to give him a regular flogging, I caught him by the collar and jerked him into the middle of the room, setting him down on the floor with force enough to bewilder him a little, and ordered him to sit there till I released him, and his surprise was such that he actually did not move till I told him to. I met no attempt to put my authority at defiance after that. A schoolfellow here and classmate in college was Chester A. Arthur, afterward President of the United States, a brilliant Hellenist, and one of the best scholars and thinkers in the class.

There were two associate principals at the head of the school, one for the classics, and the other for mathematics. Of the former I became a favorite on account of the facility with which I got on in his branches, and when the year was up I passed easily the examinations for entrance into college, and by his advice entered in the freshman year, though fairly well prepared to enter the sophomore with slight conditions. He was anxious that I should do him credit in college. But long before the term was out I found that the routine gave me hardly an occupation. I had already done all the mathematics of the year at De Ruyter, and the Latin and Greek came so easy that I found myself idle most of my time. I decided to try a fresh examination in order to gain a year by re?ntering as a sophomore. The faculty declared such a thing unprecedented and inadmissible, to which I replied that I would then go to another college and enter, quite oblivious of the fact that I had neither the means nor the consent of my family to leave its protection and go to another city. The classical principal of the Lyceum, who was also a tutor in the college, did what he could to dissuade me, but I persisted and offered myself for examination, and found him on the examining committee. He was really fond of me, and in my own interest wanted me to go through college with honors, but this was to me of trivial importance, compared with the abbreviation by a year of the captivity of college life. He punished me by putting me to read for examination a passage of Juvenal, which I had never opened, as it did not come in the course even of the sophomores, but I passed fairly well on it, and he, with a little irritation, gave me the certificate, saying that it was not for what I did, but for what he knew me to be capable of. So, conditioned by some trivial supplementary examinations on subjects which I do not remember, I went up a class.

The constitution of Union College, like most of the American schools of the highest grade at that time, differed from that of the English model in some respects very widely. The "University" of Union was completed by collegated schools for medicine, divinity, law, and technical education. The medical and law schools of Union were at Albany, the capital of New York State. Our college buildings were three-one, West College, in the town, for the freshman and sophomore classes, and two on the hill above the town, North and South colleges, for the juniors and seniors. As a large proportion of the students were young men to whom the expenses of the education were a serious matter, many prepared themselves at home to enter the junior class, so that a class which only numbered a score as freshmen, often graduated a hundred. Others, again, used to spend the winter term and vacations in teaching in the rural or "district" schools to pay the expenses of the other terms, and the majority of the graduates were of these classes of men, often adults on entering, so that the class gathered seriousness as it went on.

The freshmen and sophomores, delegated to the care of the junior professors and tutors, indulged in many of the escapades of juvenility for which university life in most countries is distinguished, and were continually brought under the inflictions of college discipline, and now and then some one was expelled. The favorite tricks of getting a horse or cow into the recitation rooms, fastening the tutors in their rooms just before the class hours, tying up, or stealing, the bell which used to wake the students and call them to prayers or recitations, with rare and perilous excursions into the civic domain, or a fire alarm caused by setting fire to the outhouses, which always brought down on us the wrath of the firemen, varied the monotony of the student life, as everywhere else; but as I roomed at home for the first year I never had part in these escapades, and in my sophomore winter I took a district school in one of the valleys tributary to that of the Mohawk, in which the town lies.

The community in which the school was situated was almost exclusively composed of Scotch Cameronians, of whom several families were the descendants of a then still vigorous patriarch of the sternest type of that creed. It was necessary to pass a special examination to get the State certificate necessary to teach a district school, and this I had passed, but had still to undergo the questioning of the trustees of the district, canny and cautious beyond the common. The wages for such a school were twelve dollars a month and "board around," i.e. staying at the houses of the parents a week for each pupil in turn, beginning with those in best estate, so that, as the school had never less than twenty or thirty pupils, the poorer families were never called on. One of the boys intended to go to college, and his father was willing to pay a special contribution to secure a teacher of Latin, and this brought my wages up to sixteen dollars a month. But the cautious Scots urged a conditional engagement,-a trial of one month,-a condition which, as I might have anticipated, would end the engagement with the month, considering the composition of the district and the usual difference of views among the people. The two most advanced and oldest of the pupils belonged to families bound together by the most cordial jealousy which a petty community could inspire, and one of these was my Latin pupil. His rival was a lazy student and a turbulent scholar, with whom I had difficulties from insubordination from the beginning. As, however, I had adopted the rule of depending entirely on moral suasion in the government of the school and refused to flog, but instead offered prizes for good behavior and studiousness at my own expense for each week, my confidence in the better qualities of human nature betrayed me from the beginning. The prizes went to stimulate the jealousies between the two leaders, and the only punishment I would inflict, that of sending the pupil home for disobedience, made domestic difficulties.

The first week of the month I was boarded in the family of our patriarch, whose grandsons furnished a number of the pupils, and the life they led me was not one to make me regret the termination of the engagement. I was awaked while it was still night to join in family prayers, which were of a severity of which I had never dreamed. First a long selection of Psalms was read, then another long one sung, and then a prayer which, as I noticed by the clock, varied from ten to twelve minutes, through which, being still drowsy, I slept, being awakened by the family rising from their knees. This was the invariable routine gone through twice a day. As in our own family, with the exception of the Saturday morning family service, the devotions were always those of the closet, this tedium of godliness was a serious infliction. I was waked out of sound sleep, and bored through, before breakfast, by vain repetitions lasting on an average half an hour, after having endured the same for another half-hour before being allowed to go to bed. No escape was permitted even to the ill-willing, and it may easily be imagined that this addendum to the annoyances of my school hours made the position of the district schoolmaster one for which sixteen dollars a month was no compensation.

The conflicts in the school, if they gave me less tedium, were all the more acute. My Latin scholar was a lad who meant to profit by his opportunities and devoted himself to his studies, and, naturally, had a most cordial collaboration on my part, while the son of the rival citizen was both lazy and refractory, so that, with my system of inflicting no corporal punishments, he got none of the weekly prizes, and got such milder punishments as could be inflicted. To tell the truth, the pupils who were refractory to my system were few in proportion, and the school was a pleasanter place than if the rod had been always in hand, as in the days of my boyhood. But the month of trial did not elapse without signs of a storm brewing in the valley. My novel system of sparing the rod and spoiling the children could not fail to provoke the disapproval of the orthodox, and the head of the conspiracy was the father of my lazy schoolboy.

I left the valley for a visit home, on the last week of the month on Friday night, and started back on foot, a walk of fifteen or twenty miles, on Sunday afternoon, too late for convenience as I discovered in the event. That portion of the valley of the Mohawk, a broad and level plain, is bounded on the west by a range or ranges of hills divided by deep valleys running north and south, perpendicular to the course of the river, and in one of these valleys lay the township of Princeton, in the middle of which was the schoolhouse, the farms of the community being scattered over the hills around, and some of them at distances of a mile or two. It was the head of the glen, and the lay of the land was almost that of an amphitheatre, cannily chosen by the father of the colony, the old Cameronian whose prayers and long services grated so on my New England Puritanism. Before I turned out of the Mohawk valley into that of Princeton, the sun had set, with all the signs of a coming snowstorm, which broke on me suddenly in the glen with a furious north wind tearing down the gorge and drifting the snow as it fell, so that before I had gone a mile with the snow in my face, it was almost impossible to force my way against snow and wind. I wore a long Spanish cloak, such as was much in vogue then and there; wrapping my face in it so that only my eyes were free, I fought on, sometimes only able to walk backward from the cutting cold against my face and eyes, making very slow progress; but it was Sunday night, and the school must be opened at 9 A.M. on Monday. The snow gathered in drifts often up to my middle, with bare, wind-swept spaces between, and these drifts at times were crusted with wind-packed snow too hard to be waded through, and I was obliged to break the snow crust by throwing myself at full length on it. In this way I struggled on till ten at night, when I came to a solitary house by the roadside, at which I stopped to ask a night's lodging, for I could fight the weather no longer. The house was dark and the family asleep, but I was admitted. The bed given me was as cold as the snow outside, but it was luxury compared to some of the quarters I had in my school district. At one of the houses at which I had to take my turn, I remember that there had been, as an afterthought of the house architect, a door cut between the room I slept in and the farmyard, but, whether from indifference or inability, the door had never been put in, and a curtain which supplied its place and was intended to keep the snow out, did it so incompletely that I found in the morning-after a snowy night-that a heavy drift had formed between the opening and the bed. In this room, too, I shared the bed of the hired man, who was paid the same wages as mine, and in the eyes of the community was therefore in every way my equal.

On reaching the schoolhouse the next morning, I found gathered there not only a part of the scholars, but some of their parents,-including the trustees of the school,-and was not long in learning that my absence had been made use of by the disaffected of the district to depose me. We had a brief debate, not on the question whether I should go or not, but on the grounds of disaffection. The father of my lazy boy was, of course, the spokesman, and it seemed as if he resented his son's not being flogged, for want of discipline and partiality were the burden of his complaint. This gave me ample opportunity for a statement of my principles in instruction, and to say that his son was the laziest and most stupid boy in the school, and that instruction was wasted on him, and to contrast his progress and qualities with those of my Latin boy. It was malicious, I admit, but it was successful in infuriating the debate, and as I saw by the gathering that the majority had decided to avail themselves of the month's conditional engagement to dismiss me, I was quite indifferent to the discord I left behind me.

"It's all very fine for you," said my antagonist, whose Scotch I will not attempt to reproduce, "to sit up there on your desk and get your sixteen dollars a month, as if you were a hard-working man,"-to which I replied, "Perhaps you think you can come up here and earn it." As I was quite indifferent to the dismissal, and only did not avail myself of the privilege of going because I always had an obstinate way of sticking to a thing I had begun till it was finished, I made no attempt to conciliate, and it was with neither surprise nor serious annoyance that I received my notice of dismissal. The only things I had enjoyed, indeed, during the month, had been the walks through the dense forest from the farmhouses to the schoolhouse in the quiet sunshine of the winter mornings. The woods were more natural and older than those around my home, and there was a freshness in the early day which I never had realized so fully as in these morning walks to school, and I shall always remember the snowy silence of that forest, the first, on that scale, I had become familiar with.

But the poverty of the lives of these prosperous farmers was a revelation even to me, accustomed as I was to a domestic simplicity which would surprise modern Americans of any degree. New books were a luxury none of them indulged in; beyond the Bible and two or three volumes of general information, there was no reading except a weekly newspaper, and the diet was such as I had never been used to, even at De Ruyter. But for the vegetables of the farm, sailors at sea would fare better than these landsmen. In later years I boarded with one of the farmers in an adjoining valley, where I was engaged in painting a cascade of great beauty, and for the six weeks I lived in the family I saw only two articles of animal food-salt mackerel for breakfast and salt pork for dinner. The narrowness of intellectual range and the bigotry-political and religious-prevailing amongst them was such as I had in no experience ever encountered, even in the "straitest sect of the Pharisees," the Seventh Day Baptist Church of my youth. In the community in which I had grown, there was always the early influence of the sea to widen the range of thought and sympathy, but here, in the narrow valley to which the farmer was confined, neither nature nor religion seemed to have any liberating or liberalizing power. A sturdy independence was the dominant trait of character, but this independence was converted into a self-enslavement by the narrow range of thought which everywhere prevailed. The old Cameronian patriarch, in his sectarian exaltation, seemed almost a luminary in the intellectual twilight of that secluded community, and it was possible there to understand how even a narrow religious fanaticism could become an ennobling element in the character of a community living in such a restricted and materializing atmosphere. A few weeks in such a state of society enables one to understand better the irresistible attraction of cities and the life in the midst of multitudes to the rustic, born and raised in the back-water stagnation of a rural life like that of the farmers of my school district.

The remaining two months of the broken term of the college course and the better part of the vacation were spent in my father's workshop, where the work was rather pressing and the shop short-handed. My father's business was mainly the manufacture of certain mechanical implements for which he and his brother held the patents, and in the spring and autumn he was accustomed to carry the consignments of them to his customers in New York. His workshop was resorted to by several ingenious fellow New Englanders who had inventions to work out, and in the execution of these I was found useful. Among these was one Daniel Ball, whose specialty was locks, of which he invented, patented, and sold the patents of a new one every year, all worked out in my father's shop. Ball was a man of remarkable mechanical ingenuity and extraordinary profanity-of a savage temper, and very exclusive in his human sympathies; but he had a profound reverence for my father, of whom he used to say that "Old Joe Stillman was the only honest man God ever made," and I am inclined to think, looking back on a long life and wide experience in men of all classes and many nations, that Ball was justified in the esteem he held my father in, though admissibly wrong in his exclusiveness,-for I cannot recall, in all my memories of the old man, a single instance of his hesitating over the most trivial transaction in which a question of honesty was involved, and I have known him to relinquish his clear rights rather than to provoke a disagreement with a neighbor. He had a profound aversion to any ostentation of religious fervor, as had my mother. If he had lived to-day he would certainly have been an advanced evolutionist; even then his liberality in matters of doctrine and his unbounded charity towards all differences of opinion in religious questions used to cause my mother great anxiety as to his orthodoxy. He thought the fields and woods better places to pass the Sabbath in than a meeting-house, and this was a subject of great pain to her, the more that he developed the same feeling in me; but he never deferred in these matters to anybody, and never held a shade of that reverence for the clergy which was almost a passion in my mother's nature. While of an extreme tenderness of heart to all suffering or hardship outside the family, even towards animals, his domestic discipline was brutal and narrow. In the latter respect he was a survival of the old New England system; in the former, himself.

I had a parrot given me by one of my brothers returning from the Southern States, and the bird took an extravagant fondness for my father rather than for me. He was allowed to go free about the house and garden, and would go and sit on the fence when my father should be coming back from the workshop to dinner and supper, and run to meet his footstep long before he was in sight, chuckling and chattering with delight. Early one morning the parrot got shut, by chance, in the cupboard, and, attempting to gnaw his way out, was mistaken for a rat, and father took the shovel to kill him, while mother carefully opened the door so that the rat might squeeze his way out to be killed, but poor Poll got the blow instead, and had his neck broken. All that day my father stayed at home weeping for Polly, and no business misfortune in my recollection ever affected him as the death of the parrot did. He could flog me without mercy, but he could not see the suffering of a domestic or wild animal without tears, nor would he tolerate in us children the slightest tendency to cruelty to the least living thing.

I have alluded to the differences between him and my mother on the subject of education, the inutility of which, beyond a common-school standard, he made an article of faith, and the return to the workshop for the balance of the vacation, after my school-teaching failure, was the occasion of the final battle. As the vacation drew to an end, and the time which was still available for studying up the subjects of the last term, for the examination on re?ntering, approached its imperative limit, I notified him that I must stop work. He said nothing until I had actually given it up and gone back to my study, about two weeks before the examination day. Coming home from the shop that day to dinner, in a very bad humor, he asked me why I had not been at work. I replied that I had barely the time absolutely necessary to make up my arrears of study to enter college for the next term. Then he broke out on me with a torrent of abuse as an idle, shirking boy, who only cared to avoid work, ending with the accusation that all I wanted was to "eat the bread of idleness," a phrase he was very fond of. I suppose I inherited some of his inequality of temper, and I replied by leaving the table, throwing my chair across the room as I did so; and, assuring him that when I ate another morsel of bread in his house he would know the reason why, I left the house in a towering rage. Having forewarned him days before that I must go, without his making the least objection, and having postponed the step to the latest possible moment, out of consideration for the work in hand, I considered this treatment as ungenerous, and was indignant.

I do not think that, weighing all the circumstances of the case, one could say that my father was entitled to impose his authority in a purely arbitrary interference with a matter in which the family council had decided on my course, and which involved all my future, or that my refusal to obey an irrational command implies any disrespect to him. At all events, I decided at once that I would not yield in this matter, and I made my preparations to seek another home, even with a modification in my career. If I must abandon the liberal education, I would not waste my life in a little workshop with three workmen, and no opportunity to widen the sphere of activity, or opening into a larger occupation. If I should be obliged to leave the college, it should be for something in the direction of art, and in this light I did not much regret the change. I had not, however, calculated on my mother's tenacity, or the imperceptible domination she exercised over my father.

When I returned to the house to get my clothes and make my preparations for leaving home for good, I had a most painful scene with my mother, and it was the only serious misunderstanding I ever had with her. She went through, in a rapid résumé, the history of my life, from the day when I was given her in consolation for the little brother before me, who died, with a word for each of the crises through which her care had carried me,-accidents, grave maladies, for I was apparently not a strong child, and at several conjunctures my life had been despaired of; all the story being told as she walked up and down rapidly in the chamber, with the tears running down her cheeks, and with a passionate vehemence I had never suspected her to be capable of, since she had the most complete self-restraint I ever knew in a woman. But it was an impasse-I neither could nor would go back from the career decided upon, nor would the family have consented, and to return to the workshop at my father's insistence was to lose everything. It seemed brutal to refuse mother's entreaties to ignore the collision of wills, and to go on as if nothing had happened, but to do this and remain in the house with my father, in the perpetual danger of another conflict, was impossible. The question had to be settled, and all I could do was to insist on father's making a distinct disavowal of any right or intention to demand my services in the shop at any future time, and leaving me free to follow the programme agreed on in the family council. It was in effect a frank apology that I wanted, but I knew him too well to suppose he would ever consent to make an apology in words, or to admit to me that he had made a mistake; and I left the solution in my mother's hands, with the understanding that the definite promise should be made to her, and I knew too that this would hold him as completely as if made to a public authority. Nothing could bring her to contradict him openly, and in all my life I never saw her make a sign of disrespect for his mastery in domestic things, but I knew that once this promise was made to her I could count on his being held to it sternly.

That evening the matter was settled, but of what had passed, or what was said, I never knew anything, for my mother never wasted words; and, while no apology was made, or any retraction expressed, neither my father nor myself ever alluded to the subject of my working in the shop again, nor did I ever, as before, go into it during the vacations, or offer to assist when affairs were hurried. The habit of asserting the paternal authority and the sense of it, in my father, were so strong that I never risked again reviving it.