rew away.

When I came in due time to observe that property and a hardened
character were not identical, and that families of ease in which one
might happen to visit were not deficient in education because their
incomes were large--I think it was at first with a certain sense of
surprise. It is impossible to convey to one differently reared the
delicious _naivete_ of this state of mind.

Whatever the "personal peculiarities" of our youthful conceptions of
life, as acquired at Andover, one thing is sure--that we grew into
love of reality as naturally as the Seminary elms shook out their
long, green plumes in May, and shed their delicate, yellow leaves in
October.

I can remember no time when we did not instinctively despise a sham,
and honor a genuine person, thing, or claim. In mere social pretension
not built upon character, intelligence, education, or gentle birth,
we felt no interest. I do not remember having been taught this, in so
many words. It came without teaching.

My father taught me most things without text-books or lessons. By far
the most important portion of what one calls education, I owe to him;
yet he never preached, or prosed, or played the pedagogue. He talked
a great deal, not to us, but with us; we began to have conversation
while we were still playing marbles and dolls. I remember hours of
discussion with him on some subject so large that the littleness
of his interlocutor must have tried him sorely. Time and eternity,
theology and science, literature and art, invention and discovery
came each in its turn; and, while I was still making burr baskets, or
walking fences, or coasting (standing up) on what I was proud to
claim as the biggest sled in town, down the longest hills, and on the
fastest local record--I was fascinated with the wealth and variety
which seem to have been the conditions of thought with him. I have
never been more _interested_ by anything in later life than I was in
my father's conversation.

I never attended a public school of any kind--unless we except the
Sunday-school that studied Acts--and when it came time for me to
pass from the small to the large private schools of Andover, the same
paternal comradeship continued to keep step with me. There was no
college diploma for girls of my kind in my day; but we came as near to
it as we could.

There was a private school in Andover, of wide reputation in its time,
known to the irreverent as the "Nunnery," but bearing in profe