quainted with the summer residents, read a good deal of the time,
took long walks into the interior,--a rough, aboriginal country, where
they still talk Dutch,--and waited for an answer to my application.
When it came at last, I fretted about it considerably, and was for
starting off in search of something else. I had an idea of getting a
place as botanist on Coprolite's survey of the Nth parallel, and I
wrote to New Haven for letters. I thought it would be a good outdoor,
horseback sort of life, and might lead to something better. But that
fell through, and meanwhile the dominie kept saying: 'My dear fellow,
don't be in too much of a hurry to begin. Young America goes so fast
nowadays that it is like the dog in the hunting story,--a _leetle_ bit
ahead of the hare. Why not stay here for awhile and ripen--ripen?' The
dominie had a good library,--all my old college favorites, old Burton,
old Fuller, and Browne, etc., and it seemed the wisest course to
follow his advice for the present. But in the fall my uncle had a
slight stroke of paralysis, and really needed my help for awhile; so
that what had been a somewhat aimless life, considered as loafing,
became all at once a duty. At first he had a theological student, from
somewhere across the river, come to stay in the house and read service
for him on Sundays. But he was a ridiculous animal, whose main idea of
a minister's duties was to intone the responses in a sonorous manner.
He used to practice this on week days in his surplice, and I remember
especially the cadence with which he delivered the sentence: 'Yea,
like a broken _wall_ shall ye be and as a ruined _hedge_.'

"He got the huckleberry, as we used to say in college, on that
particular text, and it has stuck by me ever since. The dominie fired
him out after a fortnight, and one day said to me: 'Jack, why don't
_you_ study for orders and take up the succession here? You are a
bookworm, and the life seems to be to your liking.' Of course, I
declined very vigorously in the beginning, though offering to stay on
so long as the dominie needed my help. I used to do lay reading on
Sundays when he was too feeble. Gradually, 'the idea of the life did
sweetly creep into my study of imagination.' The quaintness of the
place appealed to me. And here was a future all cut out for me: no
preliminary struggle, no contact with vulgar people, no cut-throat
competition, but everything gentlemanly and independent about it. I
had strong