study, and many holidays we spent on the
harbor, dredging for shells, and great was our joy when he discovered
a new species, which was named after him by the Lyceum of Natural
History of New York.

The following year my fifth brother, Jacob, on leaving college, took
charge of a school in the centre of New York State, built by the
Sabbatarian community at large, in De Ruyter, a village of which many
of the inhabitants were Sabbatarians, and it was decided that I should
go there to follow my studies in preparation for college. I was to
"board out" a debt which an uncle owed to my eldest brother, and
which was uncollectible in any other way, and there I made my first
acquaintance with semi-independent life, exchanging a home for a
dormitory and a boarding-house. My uncle was to supply also my
bedding, the academy being provided with bedsteads; but he was a
heedless man, and I remember that I had to sleep six weeks on the
bed-cords, with my wearing apparel as my only covering, before he
awoke to the fact that I had a prepaid claim on him for mattress and
bedding. But we were on the edge of a great forest, and in the almost
primeval woodland I found compensation for many discomforts, and what
time my tasks spared me was spent wandering there. The persistent
apathy which had oppressed me for so many years still refused to lift,
and my stupidity in learning was such that my brother threatened to
send me home as a disgrace to the family. I had taken up Latin again,
algebra, and geometry, and, though I was up by candlelight in the
morning, and rarely put my books away till after ten at night except
for meals, it was impossible for me to construe half of the lesson
in Virgil, and the geometry was learned by rote. I at length gave up
exercise to gain time for study, and my despairing struggles were
misery. I was then fourteen, and in the seventh year of this darkness,
and it seemed to me hopeless.

What happened I know not, but about the middle of the first term the
mental fog broke away suddenly, and before the term ended I could
construe the Latin in less time than it took to recite it, and the
demonstrations of Euclid were as plain and clear as a fairy story. My
memory came back so completely that I could recite long poems after
a single reading, and no member of the class passed a more brilliant
examination at the end of the term than I. At the end of the second
term I could recite the whole of Legendre's geometry, plane an