ey prayed, and not in the President. I remember that Miss Eliza Leslie
told me in later years of just such another trio.

My grandfather in Holliston was, as his father and brothers and uncles
had all been, an old Revolutionary soldier, who had been four years in
the war and taken part in many battles. He had been at Princeton (where
I afterwards graduated) and Saratoga, and witnessed the surrender of
Burgoyne to Gates. I was principally concerned to know whether the
conqueror had _kept the sword_ handed to him on this occasion, and was
rather disappointed to learn that it was given back. Once I found in the
garret a bayonet which my grandma said had been carried by grandfather in
the war. I turned it with a broom-handle into a lance and made ferocious
charges on the cat and hens.

This grandfather, Oliver Leland, exerted an extraordinary influence on
me, and one hard to describe. He was great, grim, and taciturn to
behold, yet with a good heart, and not devoid of humour. He was gouty,
and yet not irritable. He continually recurs to me while reading
Icelandic sagas, and as a kind of man who would now be quite out of the
age anywhere. All his early associations had been of war and a half-wild
life. He was born about 1758, and therefore in a rude age in rural New
England. He, I may say, deeply interested me.

All boys are naturally full of the romance of war; the Revolution was to
us more than the Crusades and all chivalry combined, and my grandfather
was a living example and chronicle of all that I most admired. Often I
sat on a little cricket at his feet, and listened to tales of battles,
scoutings, and starving; how he had been obliged to live on raw wheat,
which produced evil results, and beheld General Washington and other
great men, and had narrow escapes from Indians, and been at the capturing
of a fort by moonlight, and seen thousands of pounds' worth of stores
destroyed. I frequently thought of old grandfather Oliver when "out"
myself during the Civil War, and was half-starved and chilled when
scouting, or when doing rough and tough in West Virginia.

My grandfather often told me such stories of the war, and others of his
father and grandfather, who had fought before him in the old French war
in Canada, and how the latter, having gone up to trade among the Indians
one winter, endeared himself so much to them that they would not let him
go, and kept him a captive until the next summer. I came acros