season of relief. One good lady, I was told, was in the habit of asking
students to her house on Saturday afternoons and praying with and for
them. Bodily exercise was not, however, entirely superseded by spiritual
exercises, and a rudimentary form of base-ball and the heroic sport of
football were followed with some spirit.

A slight immature boy finds his materials of though and enjoyment in very
shallow and simple sources. Yet a kind of romance gilds for me the sober
tableland of that cold New England hill where I came in contact with a
world so strange to me, and destined to leave such mingled and lasting
impressions. I looked across the valley to the hillside where Methuen
hung suspended, and dreamed of its wooded seclusion as a village
paradise. I tripped lightly down the long northern slope with facilis
descensus on my lips, and toiled up again, repeating sed revocare gradum.
I wandered' in the autumnal woods that crown the "Indian Ridge," much
wondering at that vast embankment, which we young philosophers believed
with the vulgar to be of aboriginal workmanship, not less curious,
perhaps, since we call it an escar, and refer it to alluvial agencies.
The little Shawshine was our swimming-school, and the great Merrimack,
the right arm of four toiling cities, was within reach of a morning
stroll. At home we had the small imp to make us laugh at his enormities,
for he spared nothing in his talk, and was the drollest little living
protest against the prevailing solemnities of the locality. It did not
take much to please us, I suspect, and it is a blessing that this is apt
to be so with young people. What else could have made us think it great
sport to leave our warm beds in the middle of winter and "camp out,"--on
the floor of our room,--with blankets disposed tent-wise, except the fact
that to a boy a new discomfort in place of an old comfort is often a
luxury.

More exciting occupation than any of these was to watch one of the
preceptors to see if he would not drop dead while he was praying. He had
a dream one night that he should, and looked upon it as a warning, and
told it round very seriously, and asked the boys to come and visit him in
turn, as one whom they were soon to lose. More than one boy kept his eye
on him during his public devotions, possessed by the same feeling the man
had who followed Van Amburgh about with the expectation, let us not say
the hope, of seeing the lion bite his head off so