elong to his
experiences in education.

Here is his account of his first attendance at the central town-school
of Dorchester, after he had left a dame-school.

"In this school, on first entering it, I was placed at the bottom of the
lowest class; but even that was a position beyond my previous
attainments. Unable to spell the words which formed the lesson, I used,
when they came down to me from the boy above, to say just what he did,
not being far enough advanced to insinuate a blunder of my own. But in
the course of a few months I made great progress. In writing I was
rather forward. I can remember writing 1799 at the bottom of the page in
my copybook; and this is the oldest date which as a date I can
recollect. I was then five years old.[D] My father having, as a reward
for my improvement, promised me a boughten 'writing-book,' as it was
called, instead of a sheet of paper folded at home, with which children
usually began, the brilliant prospect melted me almost to tears.

"Each boy in those days provided his own 'ink-horn,' as it was called.
Mine was a ponderous article of lead, cast by myself at the kitchen
fire, with a good deal of aid from the hired man who was employed in the
summer to work the little farm. For pens we bought two goose-quills
fresh from the wing, for a cent; older boys paid that sum for a single
'Dutch quill.'...

"In the year 1802, a new district school-house was built near our
residence, to which I was transferred from the school on the
meeting-house hill. It was kept by Mr. Wilkes Allen, afterwards a
respectable clergyman at Chelmsford. I was now between eight and nine
years old. My eldest brother had left school, and was in a counting-room
in Boston; my second brother had entered college; and as we were, almost
all of us little folks at Mr. Allen's, I was among the most advanced. I
began the study of arithmetic at this time, using Pike as the text-book.
I recollect proceeding to the extraction of the cube-root, without the
slightest comprehension of the principle of that or any of the simplest
arithmetical operations. I could have comprehended them, had they been
judiciously explained, but I could not penetrate them without aid. At
length I caught a glimpse of the principle of decimals. I thought I had
made a discovery as confidently as Pythagoras did when he demonstrated
the forty-seventh proposition of the first book of Euclid. I was
proportionately annoyed when I afterwards discovered