me a mystery. While I always
possessed a keen sense of the ludicrous, and a hearty appreciation of
fun of all sorts, there was a sedate side of my nature that demonstrated
itself to the older members of the family, and of which they often
spoke. For half days, or whole days, at a time I remember sitting on a
small footstool beside an ordinary chair on which lay open "Scott's
Commentaries on the Bible." I not only read the Scriptures out of this
book, but long discourses of Thomas Scott, and passages adjoining. I
could not have understood much of these profound and elaborate
commentaries. They were not written or printed for children, but they
had for my childish mind a fascination that kept me from play, and from
the ordinary occupations of persons of my years.

So, also, it was with the religious literature of the old-fashioned
kind, with which some of the tables of my father's house were piled.
Indeed, when afterwards I was living at my brothers' house, he a
clergyman, I read through and through and through the four or five
volumes of Dwight's "Theology," which must have been a wading-in far
beyond my depth. I think if I had not possessed an unusual resiliency of
temperament, the reading and thinking so much of things pertaining to
the soul and a future state would have made me morbid and unnatural.
This tendency to read and think in sacred directions was not a case of
early piety. I do not know what it was. I suppose in all natures there
are things inexplicable. How strange is the phenomenon of childhood days
to an old man!

How well I remember Sanderson's stage coach, running from New Brunswick
to Easton, as he drove through Somerville, New Jersey, turning up to the
post-office and dropping the mail-bags with ten letters and two or three
newspapers! On the box Sanderson himself, six feet two inches, and well
proportioned, long lash-whip in one hand, the reins of six horses in the
other, the "leaders" lathered along the lines of the traces, foam
dripping from the bits! It was the event of the day when the stage came.
It was our highest ambition to become a stage-driver. Some of the boys
climbed on the great leathern boot of the stage, and those of us who
could not get on shouted "Cut behind!" I saw the old stage-driver not
long ago, and I expressed to him my surprise that one around whose head
I had seen a halo of glory in my boyhood time was only a man like the
rest of us. Between Sanderson's stage-coach and a Chic