beautiful in its time;" that fears, superstitions, errors, quicken imagination and restrain passion as truly as doubts, reasonings, strugglings, strengthen the judgment, mature the moral nature, and lead to light?

I am dilating upon all this too much, perhaps. I let my pen run. Sitting down here in the blessed [19]country home, with nothing else in particular just now to do, at the age of sixty-three, I have time and am disposed to look back into my early life and to reason upon it; and although I have nothing uncommon to relate, yet what pertains to me has its own interest and significance, just as if no other being had ever existed, and therefore I set down my experience and my reflections simply as they present themselves to me.

In casting back my eyes upon this earliest period of my life, there are some things which I recall, which may amuse my grandchildren, if they should ever be inclined to look over these pages, and some of which they may find curious, as things of a bygone time.

Children now know nothing of what "'Lection" was in those days, the annual period, that is, when the newly elected State government came in. It was in the last week in May. How eager were we boys to have the corn planted before that time! The playing could not be had till the work was done. The sports and the entertainments were very simple. Running about the village street, hither and thither, without much aim; stands erected for the sale of gingerbread and beer,—home-made beer, concocted of sassafras roots and wintergreen leaves, etc.; games of ball, not base-ball, as now is the fashion, yet with wickets,—this was about all, except that at the end there was always horse-racing.

Having witnessed this exciting sport in my [20] boyhood, without any suspicion of its being wrong, and seen it abroad in later days, in respectable company, I was led, very innocently, when I was a clergyman in New York, into what was thought a great misdemeanor. I was invited by some gentlemen, and went with them, to the races on Long Island. I met on the boat, as we were returning, a parishioner of mine, who expressed great surprise, and even a kind of horror, when I told him what I had been to see. He could not conceal that he thought it very bad that I should have been there; and I suppose it was. But that was not the worst of it. Some person had then recently heard me preach a sermon in which I said, that, in thesis, I had rather undertake to defend Infidelity than Calvinism. In extreme anger thereat, he wrote a letter to some newspaper, in which, after stating what I had said, he added, "And this clergyman was lately seen at the races!" It went far and wide, you may be sure. I saw it in newspapers from all parts of the country; yet some of my friends, while laughing at me, held it to be only a proof of my simplicity.

There were worse things than sports in our public gatherings; even street fights,—pugilistic fights, hand to hand. I have seen men thus engage, and that in bloody encounter, knocking one another down, and the fallen man stamped upon by his adversary. The people gathered round, not to interfere, but to see them fight it out. [21] Such a spectacle has not been witnessed in Sheffield, I think, for half a century. But as to sports and entertainments in general, there were more of them in those days than now. We had more holidays, more games in the street, of ball-playing, of quoits, of running, leaping, and wrestling. The militia musters, now done away with, gave many occasions for them. Every year we had one or two great squirrel-hunts, ended by a supper, paid for by the losing side, that is, by the side shooting the fewest. Almost every season we had a dancing-school. Singing-schools, too, there were every winter. There was also a small band of music in the village, and serenades were not uncommon. We, boys used to give them on the flute to our favorites. But when the band came to serenade us, I shall never forget the commotion it made in the house, and the delight we had in it. We children were immediately up in a wild hurry of pleasure, and my father always went out to welcome the performers, and to bring them into the house and give them such entertainment as he could provide.

The school-days of my childhood I remember with nothing but pleasure. I must have been a dull boy, I suppose, in some respects, for I never got into scrapes, never played truant, and was never, that I can remember, punished for anything. The instruction was simple enough. Special stress was laid upon spelling, and I am inclined to think that every one of my fellow-pupils [22] learned to spell more correctly than some gentlemen and ladies do in our days.

Our teachers were always men in winter and women in summer. I remember some of the men very well, but one of them especially. What pupil of his could ever forget Asa Day,—the most extraordinary figure that ever I saw, a perfect chunk of a man? He could not have been five feet high, but with thews and sinews to make up for the defect in height, and a head big enough for a giant. He might have sat for Scott's "Black Dwarf;" yet he was not ill-looking, rather handsome in the face. And I think I never saw a face that could express such energy, passion, and wrath, as his. Indeed, his whole frame was instinct with energy. I see him now, as he marched by our house in the early morning, with quick, short step, to make the school-room fire; and a roaring one it was, in a large open fireplace; for he did everything about the school. In fact, he took possession of school, schoolhouse, and district too, for that matter, as if it were a military post; with the difference, that he was to fight, not enemies without, but within,—to beat down insubordination and enforce obedience. And his anger, when roused, was the most remarkable thing. It stands before me now, through all my life, as the one picture of a man in a fury. But if he frightened us children, he taught us too, and that thoroughly.

In general our teachers were held in great [23] reverence and affection. I remember especially the pride with which I once went in a chaise, when I was about ten, to New Marlborough, to fetch the schoolma'am. No courtier, waiting upon a princess, could have been prouder or more respectful than I was.

To turn, for a moment, to a different scene, and to much humbler persons, that pass and repass in the camera obscura of my early recollections. The only Irishman that was in Sheffield, I think, in those days, lived in my father's family for several years as a hired man,—Richard; I knew him by no other name then, and recall him by no other now,—the tallest and best-formed "exile of Erin" that I have ever seen; prodigiously strong, yet always gentle in manner and speech to us children; with the full brogue, and every way marked in my view, and set apart from every one around him,—"a stranger in a strange land." The only thing besides, that I distinctly remember of him, was the point he made every Christmas of getting in the "Yule-log," a huge log which he had doubtless been saving out in chopping the wood-pile, big enough for a yoke of oxen to draw, and which he placed with a kind of ceremony and respect in the great kitchen fireplace. With our absurd New England Puritan ways, yet naturally derived from the times of the English Commonwealth, when any observance of Christmas was made penal and punished with [24] imprisonment, I am not sure that we should have known anything of Christmas, but for Richard's Yule-log.

There was another class of persons who were frequently engaged to do day's work on the farm,—that of the colored people. Some of them had been slaves here in Sheffield. They were virtually emancipated by our State Bill of Rights, passed in 1783. The first of them that sought freedom under it, and the first, it is said, that obtained it in New England, was a female slave of General Ashley, and her advocate in the case was Mr. Sedgwick,