childhood the march of modern improvements had hardly
begun. There was a small steamboat plying on the Cayuga Lake. There was
not a single railway in the whole State. When I went away to school in
New Jersey, at the age of thirteen, the tedious journey by the
stagecoach required three days and two nights; every letter from home
cost eighteen cents for postage; and the youngsters pored over Webster's
spelling-books and Morse's geography by tallow candles; for no gas lamps
had been dreamed of and the wood fires were covered, in most houses, by
nine o'clock on a winter evening. There was plain living then, but not a
little high thinking. If books were not so superabundant as in these
days, they were more thoroughly appreciated and digested.

My father, who was just winning a brilliant position at the Cayuga
County Bar, died in June, 1826, at the early age of twenty-eight, when I
was but four and one-half years old. The only distinct recollections
that I have of him are his leading me to school in the morning, and that
he once punished me for using a profane word that I had heard from some
rough boys. That wholesome bit of discipline kept me from ever breaking
the Third Commandment again. After his death, I passed entirely into
the care of one of the best mothers that God ever gave to an only son.
She was more to me than school, pastor or church, or all combined. God
made mothers before He made ministers; the progress of Christ's kingdom
depends more upon the influence of faithful, wise, and pious mothers
than upon any other human agency.

As I was an only child, my widowed mother gave up her house and took me
to the pleasant home of her father, Mr. Charles Horton Morrell, on the
banks of the lake, a few miles south of Aurora. How thankful I have
always been that the next seven or eight years of my happy childhood
were spent on the beautiful farm of my grandfather! I had the free pure
air of the country, and the simple pleasures of the farmhouse; my
grandfather was a cultured gentleman with a good library, and at his
fireside was plenty of profitable conversation. Out of school hours I
did some work on the farm that suited a boy; I drove the cows to the
pasture, and rode the horses sometimes in the hay-field, and carried in
the stock of firewood on winter afternoons. My intimate friends were the
house-dog, the chickens, the kittens and a few pet sheep in my
grandfather's flocks. That early work on the farm did much toward