iest
of men, although he never joked; his conversation was serious and
religious, in striking contrast to his manner and usual countenance. He
spoke of heaven and hell with the same merry twinkle in his eye, the
same smiling face. His speech was accompanied by a sort of low, half
audible whistle. He encouraged me through all my troubles, and told me
not to worry about the old cider-drinking farmers, as there were more
horsewhips than one in the "deestrict." His wife's chief dread in this
mortal life was fire. She expected the house would burn up every night.
I can see now her painful look of alarm when there was news of a
conflagration anywhere; she would immediately leave her chair, look at
the stove, examine the stovepipe and peer out into the kitchen. Then it
was not unusual for dissolute, drinking men to take revenge on the total
abstainers by setting fire to their barns. There was only one family in
the district with whom I became intimate, and whose friendship across
the continent I still keep. This was the family of a retired
Universalist clergyman. They lived in a large farmhouse, and the
clergyman was engaged in reclaiming an immense bog, and occasionally
supplying some vacant neighboring pulpit. He was a visionary of a
perfect kind. All bogs were to him prospective gardens of Eden;
impossibilities to him the only things worth attempting; all men saints
and angels. He had inherited a considerable fortune, which had mostly
disappeared in the fathomless swamps of the different towns where he had
sojourned as a clergyman. His wife was a lineal descendant of one of the
heroes of Concord Bridge; a beautiful, domestic woman full of prudent
and wise counsels, which had saved the family from being swallowed up in
her husband's Utopias. Three of their younger children were among the
brightest of my pupils; three grown up sons were still at home, working
on the land a part of the year, and in winter they made boots in a
little shop attached to the house. As formerly in Hopkinton, so here in
this shop, but with more intelligence and learning, I heard and now took
part in the discussion of all sorts of questions. Their minds seemed to
have been trained in more philosophical directions than any I had met.
Here I had some new insights which helped me forward, and I heard much
of the worthlessness of religious dogmas. It was, however, with a tin
pedler, a friend and distant relative of this family, that I turned the
newest lea