n.

One of our greatest school pleasures was to watch Aunt Hannah spinning
on her flax-wheel, wetting her thumb and forefinger at her lips to
twist the thread, keeping time, meanwhile, to some quaint old tune with
her foot upon the treadle.

A verse of one of her hymns, which I never heard anybody else sing,
resounds in the farthest corner of my memory yet:"--

"Whither goest thou, pilgrim stranger,
Wandering through this lowly vale?
Knowest thou not 't is full of danger?
And will not thy courage fail?"

Then a little pause, and the refrain of the answer broke in with a
change, quick and jubilant, the treadle moving more rapidly, also:--

"No, I'm bound for the kingdom!
Will you go to glory with me?
Hallelujah! Praise the Lord!"

I began to go to school when I was about two years old, as other
children about us did. The mothers of those large families had to
resort to some means of keeping their little ones out of mischief,
while they attended to their domestic duties. Not much more than that
sort of temporary guardianship was expected of the good dame who had us
in charge.

But I learned my letters in a few days, standing at Aunt Hannah's knee
while she pointed them out in the spelling-book with a pin, skipping
over the "a b abs" into words of one and two syllables, thence taking a
flying leap into the New Testament, in which there is concurrent family
testimony that I was reading at the age of two years and a half.
Certain it is that a few passages in the Bible, whenever I read them
now, do not fail to bring before me a vision of Aunt Hannah's somewhat
sternly smiling lips, with her spectacles just above them, far down on
her nose, encouraging me to pronounce the hard words. I think she tried
to choose for me the least difficult verses, or perhaps those of which
she was herself especially fond. Those which I distinctly recall are
the Beatitudes, the Twenty-third Psalm, parts of the first and
fourteenth chapters of the Gospel of St. John, and the thirteenth
chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians.

I liked to say over the "Blesseds,"--the shortest ones best,--about the
meek and the pure in heart; and the two "In the beginnings," both in
Genesis and John. Every child's earliest and proudest Scriptural
conquest in school was, almost as a matter of course, the first verse
in the Bible.

But the passage which I learned first, and most delighted to repeat
after Aunt Hannah,--I think it mu