e academy bell at midnight by means of a string tied
to the tongue, bringing the professor in his night shirt from his bed
to chase me, covering his chimney with a board till he was well-nigh
suffocated with smoke, hitching his horse to a boat in Mill River,
pillaging his coop and scattering his hens to the four winds of
heaven, crawling under his bed at night and nearly frightening him to
death with unearthly groans, catching him by the legs as he jumped out
and leaving him kicking on the floor as I leaped through the window
amid applauding students--I was appointed assistant teacher at the
beginning of my senior year.

Then at once great dignity was assumed by me which, being resented by
my former cronies, I secured order by licking them at recess one by
one, though I suffered from many "nasal hemorrhages" while engaged
in fistic rough and tumbles to assert my authority; I conquered, but
secured many black eyes and bedewed the campus with much "claret" for
the good of the order.

At length we were declared sufficiently crammed to enter college,
and on graduation day I discoursed in stentorian tones upon "True
Heroism," amid the applause of the fair sex, and convulsed the
audience with laughter by prancing, in my enthusiastic eloquence, upon
the sore toe of one of the reverend trustees on the stage who fairly
yelled with pain: "_Sic transit gloria mundi_."

Among the sins of my youth, which I confess with "shame and confusion
of face" were the pranks played by me and some fellow-sinners upon our
nearest neighbors. These worthies consisted of an old man and what
appeared to be his much older daughter, the two most unaccountable
cranks that dame nature ever presented to my notice.

The father was possessed of the insane hallucination that he was the
greatest poet that ever lived. Often I have seen him drop his hoe in
the potato field, and run for the house so that you could hardly see
his heels for dust, looking for all the world like an animated pair of
tongs. As he expressed it, "an idee had struck him," and all mankind
would die of intellectual starvation unless he at once embodied said
"idee" in a poem.

His greatest delight was to gather about him of an evening a crowd
of young folks and read to us his preposterous "lines." On such
occasions, some of us would quietly steal away up into his garret, and
roll down over the stairs, with a thunderous uproar, a huge gilded
ball which had decorated a post outside a t