iced, to be spoken to by him was a
great honor, so that when he laid his hand upon my head and inquired if
I were a child of grace, although I had not the least idea what he
meant, I was equal to the occasion and said, "Yes, sir." My mother
smiled at my confession and I have no doubt her heart was made glad; for
though she was not at all rigid in the religious discipline of her
children, the great desire of her life was that they should be converted
and saved from the toils of Satan. I had, as early as I had any
conception of my own, a certain image of Satan as something huge, an
aggregation of all the largest objects with which I was most familiar,
arms and legs as long as the tallest trees and church steeples, and it
was of his size that I was afraid, rather than of his temptations and
torments, which I heard thundered from the pulpit. I had a fear, born of
sundry rough encounters with larger boys, of that which was superior in
strength, and to me Satan was as a big and ugly boy, whom I sometimes
looked for along the road, expecting him to dart out from behind the
stone walls, or clumps of bushes. Many writers have said harsh things
about the former religious creeds and preaching of our New England
forefathers, especially in their effects upon children. I do not agree
with them. It did often save the wayward from peril, and offered a rich
field for the imaginative interpretations of children. What does the
modern child find in a modern sermon to give him any sort of quickening?
Yes, my dear pulpit orators, with no wing left to imp your eloquence,
recover Satan in all his immense, Miltonic grandeur and energy.

Those happy Hopkinton days were filled with many new and fascinating
objects and boyish pursuits to which I gave an undivided heart. I
learned all the tricks and sleight-of-hand with which the bootmakers
amused themselves and puzzled each other in their shops. I was long in
discovering the secret of the best trick of all, which was making names
and pictures appear on the bare plaster of the shop walls by striking on
them with a woolen cap such as we all wore. Then there were all sorts of
string, button and ball tricks, and my pockets were full of articles
with which to astonish the uninitiated. He, who introduced or invented a
new trick or puzzle, was the hero of the shops for a day; and for many
days after, as soon as learned, the men and boys were confounding each
other by its performance. In those days Signor