f my life.* My mother belonged to a family of unusual intellectual
endowment, and of great rigidity of opinion. Her father, Jacob
Marshall, was a student by tendency and habit, a stone mason and farmer
by occupation, and the inventor of the press used for pressing hops and
cotton in square bales. He lived to be more than eighty years of age,
was twice married, and had a large family of children whom he educated
and trained as well as children could be trained and educated at the
close of the last century in a country town in northern Massachusetts.

For the last fifty years of his life he devoted himself to the study of
the bible and such works of history as he could command. His knowledge
of the bible was so great that he was an oracle in the town, although
he departed from the popular faith and became a Universalist. He lived
comfortably and without hard work, and in the later years of his life
he became the owner of two farms in the northerly part of Lunenburg.
As I recollect him and his farms he could not have been a good farmer.
His crop was hops, and that crop always commanded money, at a time when
it was unusual to realize money for farm produce.

As my father's house was a mile from the District School, and as there
was a school within twenty or thirty rods of my grandfather's house, I
was sent to my grandfather's for my first winter's schooling. I think
it must have been the winter of 1823-4. The teacher was Ithamar
Butters, called Dr. Butters from the circumstance that he had studied
medicine for a time with Dr. Aaron Bard, a physician in the village.
Of Dr. Butters as a teacher I remember little. He became a disbeliever
in the Bible--an agnostic of those days. I recollect a remark of his
made many years after: That he would prefer the worst hell to
annihilation, which he believed would be his fate.

I learned to read by standing in front of my mother as she read the
Bible. Of course all the letters were inverted, and the faculty of
reading an inverted page, has remained.

I went to the District School summer and winter, until I was ten years
of age, and to the winter school until I passed my seventeenth
birthday, when my school life ended. My father and mother were
scrupulous about my attendance, and I cannot recall that I was ever
allowed to be absent during the school term either for work or pleasure.

When I reached the age of ten years I was kept on the farm during the
summer months, until