m this time forward, the mother never had a well day. After
ten years of ill health and suffering, she died from too much calomel
and from slow starvation, being able to take but little food on
account of canker in her mouth and throat. Carleton, her pet, was very
much with her during his child-life, so that his recollections of his
mother were ever very clear, very tender, and profoundly influential
for good.

The first event whose isolation grew defined in the mind of "the baby
new to earth and sky," was an incident of 1825, when he was
twenty-three months old. His maternal grandfather had shot a hawk,
breaking its wing, and bringing it to the house alive. The boy baby
standing in the doorway, all the family being in the yard, always
remembered looking at what he called "a hen with a crooked bill."
Carleton's recollection of the freshet of August, 1826, when the great
slide occurred at the White Mountains, causing the death of the
Willey family, was more detailed. This event has been thrillingly
described by Thomas Starr King. The irrepressible small boy wanted to
"go to meeting" on Sunday. Being told that he could not, he cried
himself to sleep. When he awoke he mounted his "horse,"--a
broomstick,--and cantered up the road for a half mile. Captured by a
lady, he resisted vigorously, while she pointed to the waters running
in white streams down the hills through the flooded meadows and
telling him he would be drowned.

Meanwhile the hired man at home was poling the well under the sweep
and "the old oaken bucket," thinking the little fellow might have
leaned over the curb and tumbled in. Shortly afterwards he came near
disappearing altogether from this world by tumbling into the
water-trough, being fished out by his sister Mary.

In the old kitchen, a pair of deer's horns fastened into the wall held
the long-barrelled musket which his grandfather had carried in the
campaign of 1777. A round beaver hat, bullet, button, and spoon
moulds, and home-made pewter spoons and buttons, were among other
things which impressed themselves upon the sensitive films of the
child's memory.

Following out the usual small boy's instinct of destruction, he once
sallied out down to the "karsey" (causeway) to spear frogs with a
weapon made by his brother. It was a sharpened nail in the end of a
broomstick. Stepping on a log and making a stab at a "pull paddock,"
he slipped and fell head foremost into the mud and slime. Scrambling
out,