do, infringed on the dinnertime. In payment for my services I received from the farmer two huge pumpkins, charged with which I hastened home, looking forward to my mother's praise and pleasure, but was met by her in the hall, strap in hand, with which she administered a solid flogging, explaining that my father was so angry at my being out at dinner that she gave me the punishment to forestall his, which would be, as I well knew, much severer. It is more than sixty years since that punishment fell on my shoulders, but the astonishment with which I received the flogging instead of the thanks I anticipated for the wages I was bringing her, the haste with which my mother administered it lest my father should anticipate her and beat me after his fashion, are as vivid in my recollection as if it had taken place last year. This was a sample of the family discipline. I was forbidden to walk with other boys when I drove the cow to pasture; forbidden to bathe in the mill-pond near by except at stated times, to play with certain children, to amuse myself on the Sabbath, and other similar doings, all to my childish apprehension harmless in themselves, and the punishment never failed to follow the discovery of the transgression. Naturally I learned to lie, a thing contrary to my inclination and nature, and a torture to my conscience, but I had not the courage to meet the flogging, or the firmness to resist temptation and the persuasion of my young companions who rejoiced in a domestic freedom of which I knew nothing. My father's severity finally brought emancipation by its excess. He used to follow me to see if I obeyed his orders, and one day when I had been persuaded by some boys of our neighborhood to go and bathe in the forbidden hours, he found me in the pond, led me home, and, cutting two tough peartree switches about the thickness, at the butt, of his forefinger, he took me down into the cellar, and making me strip off my jacket, broke them up to the stumps over my back, protected only by a cotton shirt. This was the deciding event which determined me to run away from home, which I did the next week, and though my escapade did not last beyond ten days, on my return the rod was buried.

CHAPTER II

NATURE WORSHIP—EARLY RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCES

Looking back at my mother, after a lapse of nearly forty years since I saw her last, I am surprised at the largeness of character developed in the narrow and illiberal mould of the exclusive Puritanism of the church of her inheritance, her freedom from bigotry, and the breadth of her knowledge of human nature, as well as at the justice of her instincts of religious essentials, which always kept her cheerful and hopeful in spite of the gloomy doctrine imposed on her by her education and surroundings. Believing firmly in the eternity of hell-fire, with the logical and terrible day of judgment casting its gloomy shadow over her life, she maintained an unbounded charity for all humanity except herself, admitting the extenuation of ignorance for all others, keeping for herself even to the tithes of mint and cummin, but condoning, in her judgment of those who differed from her, the offenses which for herself she would have thought mortal sins. In her own household all latitude in religious observance was resisted with all her strength.

In my paternal grandfather's house the Seventh Day was a day of feasting, and after the church services all the connection went to the ancestral home to eat the most sumptuous dinner of the week. Against this infraction of the law which forbade on the Sabbath all work not of mercy or necessity, my mother set her face, and when this was done there was no long resistance possible and my father had to give way, so that on that day we had a cold dinner, cooked on Friday. At sunset on Friday, all work and all secular reading or amusements ceased, and only a Sabbath day's journey was permitted so far as she could control. But my father was a rover from his youth, and Saturday being his only leisure day he used to take me with him on long walks in the woods and fields, according to the season; and the weather and the length of the day were his only limitations. In the house she ruled, but out of it he made his own conscience, and so it happened that the only pleasures that I owe him, except the bringing me a few books when he came back from his business trips to New York to sell his machines, were those long walks in the face of nature. He was, in his family, apparently a cold, hard man, but out of it, kindly and benevolent, melting always to distress which came in his way; with a passionate love of animals and of nature. He was a poor business man, for he could never press for the payment of debts due to him, but his honesty was so rigid that it became a proverb in our town that a man should be "as honest as old Joe Stillman," and that good name was all he gave or left his children.

My father died in one of my occasional absences in Europe, and when I saw my old mother in the black she never again laid off, she told me, tranquilly and with a firm voice, but with the tears running down her cheeks, how he died, and said, "He was so handsome that I wanted to keep him another day." The warmth of expression struck me strangely, for in all my home experience I had never heard before a word which could be taken as a token of conjugal tenderness, but when I reflected, I could see that it was and always had been the same with the children. Of the nine children she bore, five died before she did, including her second and, during my life, her only daughter, but in all the bereavements she retained her calm, self-contained manner, weeping silently, and tranquilly going about the house, comforting those who shared the bereavement, uncomplaining, reconciled in advance; she had consigned her beloved to the God who gave them to her, and would have thought it rebellion to repine at any dispensation which He sent her. In the most sudden and crushing grief I remember her to have experienced, that which came with the news that my brother Alfred had been killed by the explosion of a steamboat boiler at New Orleans, there was one brief break-down of her fortitude, an hour's yielding, and then all her thought was for the widow and the children. No detail of the household duties was neglected, and nothing was forgotten that concerned the comfort of others. She avoided all external signs of grief, and, until my father died, she never wore mourning. Her bereavements and her prayers were matters that concerned only God and herself.

What I have said might give her the character of an ascetic, but nothing could be further from her. She was always optimistic as to earthly troubles, always cheerful and fond of mild festivities. At times no one was more merry than she, and I have seen her laughing at a good joke or story till the tears ran down her cheeks. Cheerfulness was to her a duty which was never violated except when she was laying her case before God.

Her ardent desire that her children should have a liberal education came to a climax on me, the last, born at the end of the period of child-bearing. She taught me my letters before I could articulate them, when I was two I could read, and at three I was put on a high stool to read the Bible for visitors, so that I cannot remember when I could not read, and when not more than five or six I used to be at the head of the spelling classes and spelling matches, in which all the boys and girls were divided into equal companies, and the school-teacher gave out the hardest words in the spelling-book to each side in turn, all who failed to spell their word sitting down, until the solitary survivor on one side or the other decided the victory, and even before I was seven I was generally that survivor. I read insatiably all the good story-books they would let me have, and I cannot recall the time at which there was anything even in the Bible new to me. With an incipient passion