d anon,
with quiet hand, to insinuate within my childish grasp the beatifying
lozenge, or the snow-white and aromatic sassafras or wintergreen "pipe."
The sweet savor of those frequent gifts, sweeter for their half-secret,
half-forbidden conferring, will never disappear out of my memory. That
candy, if I had the power, should be paid for with rewards (not one whit
more worth, if loving-kindness in giving be any criterion), in a place
where, we are told, "congregations ne'er break up, and Sabbaths have no
end,"--and where, therefore, let us earnestly hope, their delights are
superior to those of their earthly antetypes.

Behind us, all one year, there sat in church a platoon of imps. They
were children of a red-eyed father, who must have been a drinker; they
were curiously ugly in countenance; and they used at once to prove and
practise their petty demonism by tormenting us who sat in the pew just
before them. They slyly pulled our hair; poked us, and then, when we
turned round, made frightful, malignant faces close to ours; talked loud
in sermon-time; dropped crumbs down the backs of our necks; and
whispered loudly in our scandalized ears that standing, supreme reproach
and insult of my childish days--then confined to little boys, since
adopted by the great Democratic party--of "Nigger! Nigger!"

We had not, perhaps, too many rules at home. (There were sometimes too
many at school.) Some of them were well enough. We might not have both
butter and molasses, or butter and sugar, on the same piece of bread.
One luxury was enough. Flavors too compound coax toward the Epicurean
sty; the most compound of all is doubtless that of the feast which the
pig eateth. "Shut the door,"--a good rule. "No reading before breakfast,
nor by firelight, nor by lamp-light, nor between daylight and dark,"--an
indispensable rule for such book-devouring children as we were. But on
the question of rules it is to be observed, that the thing to be desired
is to train a child to understand or feel a principle, and to apply it,
not merely to remember and obey a rule. The reason and the moral nature
should be enlisted in support of the law. The theory of American mental
and moral education is, Minimum, of formal law and brute force, maximum
of intelligent self-control and kindly adaptation. Mere codes of rules,
whether at home or at school, set the children at work, with all their
sharp, unregenerate little wits, to pick flaws, draw distinctions, and