und
himself obliged to leave his happy home and find farm work as a poor
hireling boy. There were few farmers then in Connecticut--nay, there
were few people anywhere in the world--who knew how to treat an orphan
obliged to work for his subsistence among strangers. On a Monday
morning, with his little bundle of clothes in his hand, and an almost
bursting heart, he bade his mother and his brothers and sisters good-by,
and walked to the place which he had found for himself, on a farm a few
miles from home.

He was most willing to work; but his affectionate heart was starved at
his new place; and scarcely a day passed during his first year when he
did not burst into tears as he worked alone in the fields, thinking of
the father he had lost, and of the happy family broken up never to live
together again. It was a lonely farm, and the people with whom he lived
took no interest in him as a human being, but regarded him with little
more consideration than one of their other working animals. They took
care, however, to keep him steadily at work, early and late, hot and
cold, rain and shine. Often he worked all day in the woods chopping down
trees with his shoes full of snow; he never had a pair of boots till he
was nearly twenty-one years of age.

Once in two weeks he had a great joy; for his master let him go to
church every other Sunday. After working two weeks without seeing more
than half a dozen people, it gave him a peculiar and intense delight
just to sit in the church gallery and look down upon so many human
beings. It was the only alleviation of his dismal lot.

Poor little lonely wretch! One day, when he was thirteen years of age,
there occurred a total eclipse of the sun, a phenomenon of which he had
scarcely heard, and he had not the least idea what it could be. He was
hoeing corn that day in a solitary place. When the darkness and the
chill of the eclipse fell upon the earth, feeling sure the day of
judgment had come, he was terrified beyond description. He watched the
sun disappearing with the deepest apprehension, and felt no relief until
it shone out bright and warm as before.

It seems strange that people in a Christian country could have had a
good steady boy like this in their house and yet do nothing to cheer or
comfort his life. Old men tell me it was a very common case in New
England seventy years ago.

This hard experience on the farm lasted until he was old enough to be
apprenticed. At fourteen he