CHAPTER III.

BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL LIFE.

So great have been the social changes in this country that life

in the beginning of the past century was very different from the life at its close. It has been a century remarkable for its inventions and discoveries. I have seen the first railroad-the Boston and Lowell-running a short distance, in 1830 or 1831 when a great multitude was assembled. I was present with my father-in-law, General Walter Jones, when Mr. Morse was performing his experiments with the telegraph in the open air in front of the Capitol in 1843, and the message was sent, "What hath God wrought?"

It would be difficult to represent the simplicity of my early life, passed as it was in the retirement of a country minister's parish. Edward Everett Hale has given an account of his boyhood in the city of Boston; mine was spent in a secluded seaport town in the State of Maine. Wiscasset was one of the principal seaports, situated on an inlet, the Sheepscot River, about twelve miles from the ocean, with a splendid harbor and ships coming from every port. Merchants owned vessels to a large amount, and ships, brigs, and other vessels were in constant and profitable employment. Masts, logs and lumber of various kinds were floated in large rafts from the Kennebec. Mast-ships from Liverpool and other British ports came yearly for masts and were supplied. Some of its merchants had fine houses, and it was a town of considerable culture and refinement. My father had bought a place on a hill, sloping gently down to the bay, about half a mile from the town, and had built a comfortable dwelling-house below the crest of the hill, under a sheltering rock. The site commanded a view of the town and of the bay, which is about a mile wide, with bold and rocky headlands. The most familiar sight to me in early life was the tide coming in twice a day twelve feet and covering the flats which bounded my father's land. An Englishman, once visiting the place, said that it was equal to any view he had ever seen, and few places had such an outlook. The father of Francis Parkman, the historian, used to visit at my father's and I remem

ber his admiring the prospect and saying how much a nobleman in England would give to have such a view from his house.

To quote from Dr. Smyth, "on the east was the beautiful harbor, and the graceful lines of Birch point, fringed with forest trees. Beyond over the waters and the bold headlands were the stately hills of Edgecomb, and south and west and north, farm lands, and forests, and ranges of upland and the cheerful village with church, court-house and academy, with pleasant homes, and the broad street running down to the busy wharves. It was the most important town east of Portland, the shire town, where Daniel Webster and Jeremiah Mason argued great cases. The village bell rang out on the national holidays, and the guns of the old blockhouse made fitting reply. That old Lincoln County was like the marches of England and Scotland, for it was long in dispute between England and France, and no other region appeals more powerfully to the historic imagination. It has been the scene of the wars of races, of thrilling personal adventures, of fierce collisions and battles. What tales of courage and heroism, of midnight surprise and boldest adventure hang over its bills and promontories and are connected with the innumerable passes and channels from Merry-meeting bay to the waters of the Sheepscot and the Damariscotta! The imagination is haunted by the suggestions of a remote antiquity and the successions of dusky tribes. Here Frenchmen and Englishmen join in mortal conflict, now pirates free as the winds that fill their sails coast the shores and swoop down upon their prey, now adventurers eager for discovery and gain come with barque and pinnace."

I thus imbibed early in life a love for the beauties of nature, which has ever been a source of true pleasure, and I have always been thankful I was born in this country. One looks back to his earliest memories in wonder, so much has come between the first and latest. I have often felt, as my father did, that I had lived three lives, and that it did not seem possible that it was in this body that I did thus and so.

There is a Frenchman who says that he recollects the relief produced on his eyes when he was a baby thirty-six hours old, and a nurse lowered a curtain to screen him from the light. I cannot believe this, much less equal it, but I think that from three years on our memories retain distinct images. Goethe says he can remember his thoughts and feelings when two or three years old, I can faintly remember the burial of my grandmother, Mrs. Spring,

in September, 1815, when nearly three, and also a fire at a neighboring house. It was a very cold summer with frost every month, and the crops did not ripen. A little later most distinct impres. sions were made. One of the earliest is sitting in my father's study when he was writing his sermon, and looking out on the bay below the house and reading Belknap's History of New Hampshire, with its stories of bears killing children when they went after cows. I was three years old at the battle of Waterloo and nine years old when Napoleon died, but I do not remember hearing of his death.

Another of my earliest memories is going to church and hearing my father give out the hymn, "Behold the morning sun." My church-going was a prominent part of my early life, and I will give some recollections of that, aided by my brother's record of the same.

The meeting-house of Wiscasset was built in 1771, and was a barn-like structure, unpainted and unplastered, with the beams jutting out in the corners, and three galleries. One of the galleries was appropriated to strangers, seamen from the harbor, and sometimes was used by unruly boys. The front of the eastern side, opposite the pulpit, was occupied by the singing gallery. What seemed peculiar was that the singers on the front row of the gallery, as they rose to sing, turned their back to the pulpit and faced those on the back seat, the leader beating time, and tuningfork, bass-viol and bassoon being used. The church-music of those days was far different from now. Fugue tunes were very popular, in which the different parts of the scale seemed pursuing each other as in a race. The bell cast by Paul Revere was hung in 1800, and a centennial celebration of it was lately held in 1900, in my father's church.

In the northeastern corner of the gallery were open seats appropriated to the few colored members of the congregation. The deacons sat on the main floor in front of the pulpit, while the old men had a spacious square pew, raised above, immediately under the pulpit, on account of their deafness, and entered from the pulpit stairway. The ornaments were severely simple, little round knobs standing up on the back edge of the bench. We cannot forget those bitter winter Sabbaths in the old structure, its front door, without shelter, opening into the east wind and snow, its floor a stranger, from first to last, to the comfort of carpet, and the fierce rattling of windows when winds were high, sometimes