d too. What a treasure
was there for me! I thought the mine could never be exhausted. At least,
it contained all that I wanted then, and better reading, I think, than
that which generally engages our youth nowadays,--the great English
classics in prose and verse, Addison and Johnson and Milton and
Shakespeare, histories, travels, and a few novels. The most of these
books I read, some of them over and over, often by torchlight, sitting
on the floor (for we had a rich bed of old pine-knots on the farm);
and to this library I owe more than to anything that helped me in my
boyhood. Why is it that all its volumes are scattered now? What is
it that is coming over our New England villages, that looks like
deterioration and running down? Is our life going out of us to enrich
the great West? [29]I remember the time when there were eminent men in
Sheffield. Judge Sedgwick commenced the practice of the law here; and
there were Esquire Lee, and John W. Hurlbut, and later, Charles Dewey,
and a number of professional men besides, and several others who were
not professional, but readers, and could quote Johnson and Pope and
Shakespeare; my father himself could repeat the "Essay on Man," and
whole books of the "Paradise Lost."

My model man was Charles Dewey, ten or twelve years older than
myself. What attracted me to him was a singular union of strength and
tenderness. Not that the last was readily or easily to be seen. There
was not a bit of sunshine in it,--no commonplace amiableness. He wore no
smiles upon his face. His complexion, his brow, were dark; his person,
tall and spare; his bow had no suppleness in it, it even lacked
something of graceful courtesy, rather stiff and stately; his walk was
a kind of stride, very lofty, and did not say "By your leave," to the
world. I remember that I very absurdly, though unconsciously, tried to
imitate it. His character I do not think was a very well disciplined one
at that time; he was, I believe, "a good hater," a dangerous opponent,
yet withal he had immense self-command. On the whole, he was generally
regarded chiefly as a man of penetrative intellect and sarcastic wit;
but under all this I discerned a spirit so true, so delicate and
tender, so touched [30] with a profound and exquisite, though concealed,
sensibility, that he won my admiration, respect, and affection in an
equal degree. He removed early in life to practise the law in Indiana.
We seldom meet; but though twenty years inte