writing. I remember hearing him say, one day of that year, when I asked
him to take us to the Caravan of Wild Beasts which was coming to the
village:

"I'm sorry, but it's been a hundred Sundays since I had a dollar in my
wallet for more than ten minutes."

I have his old account book for the years of 1837 and 1838. Here are
some of the entries:

"Balanced accounts with J. Dorothy and gave him my note for $2.15,
to be paid in salts January 1, 1838. Sold ten bushels of wheat to
E. Miner at 90 cents, to be paid in goods.

"Sold two sheep to Flavius Curtis and took his note for $6, payable
in boots on or before March the first."

Only one entry in more than a hundred mentions money, and this was the
sum of eleven cents received in balance from a neighbor.

So it will be seen that a spirit of mutual accommodation served to help
us over the rough going. Mr. Grimshaw, however, demanded his pay in cash
and that I find was, mainly, the habit of the money-lenders.

We were poor but our poverty was not like that of these days in which I
am writing. It was proud and cleanly and well-fed. We had in us the best
blood of the Puritans. Our fathers had seen heroic service in the wars
and we knew it.

There were no farmer-folk who thought more of the virtue of cleanliness.
On this subject my aunt was a deep and tireless thinker. She kept a
watchful eye upon us. In her view men-folks were like floors, furniture
and dishes. They were in the nature of a responsibility--a tax upon
women as it were. Every day she reminded me of the duty of keeping my
body clean. Its members had often suffered the tyranny of the soaped
hand at the side of the rain barrel. I suppose that all the waters of
this world have gone up in the sky and come down again since those far
days, but even now the thought of my aunt brings back the odor of soft
soap and rain barrels.

She did her best, also, to keep our minds in a cleanly state of
preservation--a work in which the teacher rendered important service. He
was a young man from Canton.

One day when I had been kept after hours for swearing in a fight and
then denying it, he told me that there was no reason why I shouldn't be
a great man if I stuck to my books and kept my heart clean. I heard with
alarm that there was another part of me to be kept clean. How was it to
be done?

"Well, just make up your mind that you'll never lie, whatever else you
do," he said. "You can't do a