sober uniform, not ostentatiously distinctive, or capable of rousing democratic envy; and the old lines of caste were blurred rather than rubbed out, as servitor was softened into beneficiary. Was it possible for us in those days to conceive of a greater potentate than the president of the University, in his square doctor's cap, that still filially recalled Oxford and Cambridge?"

The father of Oliver Wendell Holmes was a Calvanist, not indeed of the severest cast, but still strictly "orthodox" in all his religious views, and when Oliver, his elder son, was fifteen years of age, he sent him to the Phillips Academy in Andover, thinking that the religious atmosphere there was less heretical than at Phillips Academy, Exeter, where Arminian tendencies were just beginning to show themselves.

"I have some recollections of Andover, pleasant and other," says Doctor Holmes. "I wonder if the old Seminary clock strikes as slowly as it used to. My room-mate thought, when he first came, it was the bell tolling deaths, and people's ages, as they do in the country. He swore (ministers' sons get so familiar with good words that they are apt to handle them carelessly), that the children were dying by the dozen of all ages, from one to twelve, and ran off next day in recess when it began to strike eleven, but was caught before the clock got through striking. At the foot of the hill, down in town, is, or was, a tidy old elm, which was said to have been hooped with iron to protect it from Indian tomahawks (Credab Hahnucmannus), and to have grown round its hoops and buried them in its wood."

The extreme conscientiousness of the boy is strikingly depicted in the following revelation:

"The first unequivocal act of wrong that has left its trace in my memory was this: refusing a small favor asked of me—nothing more than telling what had happened at school one morning. No matter who asked it; but there were circumstances which saddened and awed me. I had no heart to speak; I faltered some miserable, perhaps petulant excuse, stole away, and the first battle of life was lost.

"What remorse followed I need not tell. Then and there to the best of my knowledge, I first consciously took Sin by the hand and turned my back on Duty. Time has led me to look upon my offence more leniently; I do not believe it or any other childish wrong is infinite, as some have pretended, but infinitely finite. Yet, if I had but won that first battle!"

And what a charming picture he gives us of the peaceful, hallowing influences about him in that quiet old parsonage!

"The Puritan 'Sabbath,' as everybody knows, began at 'sundown' on Saturday evening. To such observances of it I was born and bred. As the large, round disk of day declined, a stillness, a solemnity, a somewhat melancholy hush came over us all. It was time for work to cease, and for playthings to be put away. The world of active life passed into the shadow of an eclipse, not to emerge until the sun should sink again beneath the horizon.

"It was in the stillness of the world without and of the soul within that the pulsating lullaby of the evening crickets used to make itself most distinctly heard—so that I well remember I used to think that the purring of these little creatures, which mingled with the batrachian hymns from the neighboring swamps, was peculiar to Saturday evenings. I don't know that anything could give a clearer idea of the quieting and subduing effect of the old habit of observance of what was considered holy time, than this strange, childish fancy."

Had all the clergymen who visited the parsonage been as true to their profession as his own dear father, the thoughtful, impressible boy might, very possibly, have devoted his brilliant talents to the ministry. "It was a real delight," he says, "to have one of those good, hearty, happy, benignant old clergymen pass the Sunday with us, and I can remember one whose advent made the day feel almost like 'Thanksgiving.' But now and then would come along a clerical visitor with a sad face and a wailing voice, which sounded exactly as if somebody must be lying dead up-stairs, who took no interest in us children, except a painful one, as being in a bad way with our cheery looks, and did more to unchristianize us with his woebegone ways than all his sermons were like to accomplish in the other direction. I remember one in particular who twitted me so with my blessings as a Christian child, and whined so to me about the naked black children, that he did more in that one day to make me a heathen than he had ever done in a month to make a Christian out of an infant Hottentot. I might have been a minister myself for aught I know, if this clergyman had not looked and talked so like an undertaker."

An exercise written while at Andover, shows at what an early age he attempted versification. It is a translation from the first book of Virgil's Æneid, and reads as smoothly as any lines of Pope. The following extract shows the angry god giving his orders to Zephyrus and Eurus: