e good-humored junior member of our family
always loved to make him happy by setting him chirruping about Miles
Coverdale's Version, and the Bishop's Bible, and how he wrote to his
friend Sir Isaac (Coffin) about something or other, and how Sir Isaac
wrote back that he was very much pleased with the contents of his
letter, and so on about Sir Isaac, ad libitum,--for the admiral was his
old friend, and he was proud of him. The kindly little old gentleman
was a collector of Bibles, and made himself believe he thought he should
publish a learned Commentary some day or other; but his friends looked
for it only in the Greek Calends,--say on the 31st of April, when that
should come round, if you would modernize the phrase. I recall also one
or two exceptional and infrequent visitors with perfect distinctness:
cheerful Elijah Kellogg, a lively missionary from the region of the
Quoddy Indians, with much hopeful talk about Sock Bason and his tribe;
also poor old Poor-house-Parson Isaac Smith, his head going like a
China mandarin, as he discussed the possibilities of the escape of
that distinguished captive whom he spoke of under the name, if I
can reproduce phonetically its vibrating nasalities of "General
Mmbongaparty,"--a name suggestive to my young imagination of a
dangerous, loose-jointed skeleton, threatening us all like the armed
figure of Death in my little New England Primer.

I have mentioned only the names of those whose images come up pleasantly
before me, and I do not mean to say anything which any descendant might
not read smilingly. But there were some of the black-coated gentry whose
aspect was not so agreeable to me. It is very curious to me to look back
on my early likes and dislikes, and see how as a child I was attracted
or repelled by such and such ministers, a good deal, as I found out
long afterwards, according to their theological beliefs. On the whole,
I think the old-fashioned New England divine softening down into
Arminianism was about as agreeable as any of them. And here I may
remark, that a mellowing rigorist is always a much pleasanter object to
contemplate than a tightening liberal, as a cold day warming up to 32
Fahrenheit is much more agreeable than a warm one chilling down to
the same temperature. The least pleasing change is that kind of mental
hemiplegia which now and then attacks the rational side of a man at
about the same period of life when one side of the body is liable to
be palsied, and