habits; he did not know what an abstraction was, and indeed pure meditation never was very natural to him; his mind seized most firmly upon what was presented in some concrete form. His early letters, few enough in number, are amusing for the naiveté with which this outness of life is displayed; he begins with what he has last seen, and if, before he has finished the account, something comes to interrupt it, down goes a notice of that in a parenthesis, and then he resumes his thread. I think that he went through his preparatory course with very little intellectual excitement; his quickness and habit of obeying, rather than any fondness for study, carried him through with credit.

It was this habit of attending to what was right at hand which gave him so tenacious a hold of life, and induced such hearty concern for all his interests and associations. Thus in school he studied hard; in playtime he played with a will; and as for all the drudgery of farm-work, he entered into it with a spirit which never flagged. It was not strange, therefore, that places and animals and friends to whom he had given so much of himself should have a strong hold upon his affections. Toward his school - comrades he never grew cool. In after-years he would come home delighted at having met in the street some one of them whom perhaps he had not seen for years; he sought them out and cared for their spiritual interest when that became the chief thing in his mind; and in his letters from India, would sometimes break out into a naming of one after another of his playmates, with whom school connection was quite all that he had ever had, and ask a remembrance of them should his brothers ever chance upon them.

He was as true to his nature when in the church as when in the school-room or the playground. His religious training, both at home and abroad, was of that kind which looks to firm foundations of religious belief. It was taught him that nothing short of a radical change of heart would answer the requirements of God's word. All the ordinances of religion acknowledged the necessity, and there was no room left for the satisfaction of conscience short of this complete change. David's naturalness and love of truth would have revolted at any suggestion of assuming a concern which he did not feel, while his Puritan instinct and education made him accept without question the religious observances which were required of him. He had no liking for these, but he kept to them with particular obstinacy when they happened to be rather disagreeable or unpopular, and was wholly indifferent to ridicule. remember how, when he saw one coming whom he disliked and whom he knew to be seeking him for the sake of giving advice upon matters of religion, he jumped behind a stone wall and mischievously watched him through the chinks as he went by, looking about in astonishment at the sudden disappearance of the boy; and I remember also how, wishing to complete a reading of the Bible within some appointed time, and finding himself in arrears, he read the book at every spare moment with a ludicrous energy, - in the barn, on the school-house steps in recess-time, or wherever opportunity occurred, quite regardless of quip or remonstrance. The missionary zeal which had possessed the child found in the boy no outward expression at least, for he understood very well that missionary life was condi

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tioned on a religious character which he did not pretend to have.

He regarded going to college as a matter which he could not very well avoid, and he did not therefore worry himself much about it, though he thought it rather an unnecessary measure for one who was to be a farmer. It was the height of his ambition now to emigrate West in a covered wagon, containing his goods and chattels, while he walked beside in a smock, and a dog ran beneath the wagon with that studied precision of gait which always astonished him. The summer before he entered college he spent upon the large farm of a relation in Wethersfield, Connecticut, where he was thoroughly in his element, working with a zeal and steadiness which won the praises of the farmer himself, generally incredulous of the agricultural fever of city-boys. "To-day," he writes, after recounting the glories of his life there, "I am going to study, although I do hate to. I do not want to go to college, but should like to stay here all the time. If I stay here much longer I shall be a decided farmer." father, always ready to humor the taste of his sons, knew that he was too young to decide for himself, so he required at least a year or two of college-life before letting him have his way in this. David's habit of obedience had more force than his mere inclination, and he entered on college-life with his customary heartiness, which never permitted any "might have beens" to interfere with the business at hand. His parents, solicitous first of all for his spiritual welfare, indicated a preference for Williams College, where education was under guard of Orthodox principles, and where a man was the head

His

whose name, besides its renown in philosophic inquiry, was a security for the maintenance of those principles in their integrity. David joined the Freshman Class of the college in September, 1851, just before the close of his sixteenth year.

"My earliest recollections of Dave," writes one of his classmates, "is of seeing a white-haired boy in short jacket dart out of the house next above mine, at recitation-time, and move up the street on a keen run. That was his usual street-gait; indeed I cannot seem to associate him with a sober walk at all." His boyishness at the first marked him, for though there were some in the class younger in years, these were every one more mature, and at any rate concealed much of their youth under the cloak of college dignity. David was a boy in mind and in manner, wholly unconventional in his habits, with an instinct of freedom which at home sent him roaming over the fields, and showed itself also in a determined will, a capricious impatience of restraint. The change in his outward life brought influences which acted upon his growth with great force, and produced a more rapid development than would have seemed possible under other circumstances. At home his love for nature, which was one manifestation of his instinct of freedom, had fed upon the decorous forms of suburban beauty; now he came suddenly upon the mountains and rushing streams and untamed tracts of northern Berkshire. He knew not why, but he knew how much this wildness and unshorn strength responded to his instinctive desires, and at once threw himself