om
beneath them. The conductor collected the tickets--a mysterious rite.
The gradually whitening landscape fled past, becoming ever more level
as we proceeded; by-and-by there was a welcome unpacking of the
luncheon-basket, and all the while there were the endless questions to
be asked and faithfully answered. It was already dark by the time we
were bundled out at the grimy shed which was called the depot, at West
Newton, where we were met by the Horace Manns, and somehow the transit
to the latter's house, which we were to occupy for the winter, was made.
The scene was gloomy and unpleasant; the change from the mountains
of the west depressing; and, for my part, I cannot remember anything
agreeable in this raw little suburb. American life half a century ago
had a great deal of rawness about it, and its external aspect was ugly
beyond present belief. We may be a less virtuous nation now than we were
then, but we are indescribably more good to look at. And the West Newton
of to-day, as compared with that of 1851, will serve for an illustration
of this truth.

Horace Mann's house was a small frame dwelling, painted white, with
green blinds, and furnished with a furnace stiflingly hot. One of
the first things the baby did was to crawl under the sofa in the
sitting-room and lay her small fingers against the radiator or register,
or whatever it is called, through which the heat came. She withdrew them
with a bitter outcry, and on the tip of each was a blister as big as the
tip itself. We had no glorious out-door playground in West Newton; it
was a matter of back yards and sullen streets. The snow kept piling up,
week after week; but there was no opportunity to put it to its proper
use of coasting. The only redeeming feature of the physical situation
that I recall is the momentous fact of a first pair of red-topped boots.
They were very uncomfortable, and always either wet or stiff as iron
from over-dryness; but they made their wearer as happy as they have made
all other boys since boots began. A boy of six with high boots is bigger
than most men.

But if the outward life was on the whole unprepossessing, inward
succulence was not lacking. We had the Manns, to begin with, and the
first real acquaintance between the two sets of children opened here.
Mary Peabody, my mother's elder sister, had married Horace Mann, whose
name is honorably identified with the development in this country of
common-school education. They had three