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 for nature and animal life, I
read with delight all the books of natural history I could get, and I
have heard in later years that in all the community of Sabbatarianism
I was known as a prodigy. Fortunately I was saved from a probable
idiocy in my later life by a severe attack of typhoid fever at seven,
out of which attack I came a model of stupidity, and so remained until
I was fourteen, my thinking powers being so completely suspended that
at the dame's school to which I was sent I was repeatedly flogged for
not comprehending the simplest things. I got through simple arithmetic
as far as "Long Division," and there had to turn back to the beginning
three times before I could be made to understand the principle of
division by more than one figure.

In the humiliation of this period of my life, in which I came to
consider myself as little better than a fool, my only consolation was
the large liberty I enjoyed in the woods and fields with my father
on Saturdays, or with my brothers Charles and Jacob on their long
botanizing excursions, or in the moments of leisure when I was not
wanted to turn the grindstone or blow the bellows in the workshop.
Those long walks, in which I was indefatigable, and the days or nights
when I went fishing with my brother Jacob, who was ten years older
than myself, and who inherited the wandering and adventurous longings
of my father, are the only things I can remember of this period which
gave me any pleasure. I can see vividly the banks of the Mohawk, where
we used to fish for perch, bream, and pike-perch; recall where, with
my brother Charles, we found the rarer flowers of the valley, the
cypripediums, the most rare wild-ginger, only to be found in one
locality, the walking fern, equally rare, and the long walks in the
pine forests, whose murmuring branches in the west wind fascinated me
more than any other thing in nature.

Perhaps I mingle in recollection the nature-worship of the two
septennates, for of the former was my first rapturous vision