around it, was
the pink of neatness."

In taking leave of my childhood, I must say [25] that, so far as my
experience goes, the ordinary poetic representations of the happiness of
that period, as compared with after life, are not true, and I must
doubt whether they ought to be true. I was as happy, I suppose, as most
children. I had good health; I had companions and sports; the school
was not a hardship to me,--I was always eager for it; I was never hardly
dealt with by anybody; I was never once whipped in my life, that I
can remember; but instead of looking back to childhood as the blissful
period of my life, I find that I have been growing happier every year,
up to this very time. I recollect in my youth times of moodiness and
melancholy; but since I entered on the threshold of manly life, of
married and parental life, all these have disappeared. I have had
inward struggles enough, certainly,--struggles with doubt, with
temptation,--sorrows and fears and strifes enough; but I think I have
been gradually, though too slowly, gaining the victory over them. Truth,
art, religion,--the true, the beautiful, the divine,--have constantly
risen clearer and brighter before me; my family bonds have grown
stronger, friends dearer, the world and nature fuller of goodness and
beauty, and I have every day grown a happier man.

To take up again the thread of my story, I pass from childhood to my
youth. My winters, up to the age of about sixteen, were given to [26]
school,--the common district-school,--and my summers, to assisting my
father on the farm; after that, for a year or two, my whole time was
devoted to preparing for college. For this purpose I went first, for
one year, to a school taught in Sheffield by Mr. William H. Maynard,
afterwards an eminent lawyer and senator in the State of New York. He
came among us with the reputation of being a prodigy in knowledge; he
was regarded as a kind of walking library; and this reputation, together
with his ceaseless assiduity as a teacher, awakened among us boys an
extraordinary ambition. What we learned, and how we learned it, and how
we lost it, might well be a caution to all other masters and pupils.
Besides going through Virgil and Cicero's Orations that year, and
frequent composition and declamation, we were prepared, at the end of
it, for the most thorough and minute examination in grammar, in Blair's
Rhetoric, in the two large octavo volumes of Morse's Geography, every
fact com