them, and of free
colleges too. I inquired about compulsory education. This was received
with a smile, and the remark:

"When a man's child is able to make himself powerful and honoured
according to the amount of education he acquires, don't you suppose that
that parent will apply the compulsion himself? Our free schools and free
colleges require no law to fill them."

There was a loving pride of country about this person's way of speaking
which annoyed me. I had long been unused to the sound of it in my own.
The Gondour national airs were forever dinning in my ears; therefore I
was glad to leave that country and come back to my dear native land,
where one never hears that sort of music.

A MEMORY,

When I say that I never knew my austere father to be enamoured of but one
poem in all the long half century that he lived, persons who knew him
will easily believe me; when I say that I have never composed but one
poem in all the long third of a century that I have lived, persons who
know me will be sincerely grateful; and finally, when I say that the poem
which I composed was not the one which my father was enamoured of,
persons who may have known us both will not need to have this truth shot
into them with a mountain howitzer before they can receive it. My father
and I were always on the most distant terms when I was a boy--a sort of
armed neutrality so to speak. At irregular intervals this neutrality was
broken, and suffering ensued; but I will be candid enough to say that the
breaking and the suffering were always divided up with strict
impartiality between us--which is to say, my father did the breaking, and
I did the suffering. As a general thing I was a backward, cautious,
unadventurous boy; but I once jumped off a two-story table; another time
I gave an elephant a "plug" of tobacco and retired without waiting for an
answer; and still another time I pretended to be talking in my sleep, and
got off a portion of a very wretched original conundrum in the hearing of
my father. Let us not pry into the result; it was of no consequence to
any one but me.

But the poem I have referred to as attracting my father's attention and
achieving his favour was "Hiawatha." Some man who courted a sudden and
awful death presented him an early copy, and I never lost faith in my own
senses until I saw him sit down and go to reading it in cold blood--saw
him open the book, and heard him read these following lines, wi