season, and I recall that I wrote a letter
of condolence to my people, modeled upon one in the book. How absurd and
stilted and unreal it must have sounded to them!

Oh, how crude and callow and obtuse I was at that time, full of vague
and tremulous aspirations and awakenings, but undisciplined, uninformed,
with many inherited incapacities and obstacles to weigh me down. I was
extremely bashful, had no social aptitude, and was likely to stutter
when anxious or embarrassed, yet I seem to have made a good impression.
I was much liked in school and out, and was fairly happy. I seem to see
sunshine over all when I look back there. But it was a long summer to
me. I had never been from home more than a day or two at a time before,
and I became very homesick. Oh, to walk in the orchard back of the
house, or along the road, or to see the old hills again--what a Joy it
would have been! But I stuck it out till my term ended in October, and
then went home, taking a young fellow from the district (a brother of
some girls I fancied) with me. I took back nearly all my wages, over
fifty dollars, and with this I planned to pay my way at Hedding Literary
Institute, in the adjoining county of Greene, during the coming winter
term.

I left home for the school late in November, riding the thirty miles
with Father, atop a load of butter. It was the time of year when the
farmers took their butter to Catskill. Father usually made two trips.
This was the first one of the season, and I accompanied him as far as
Ashland, where the Institute was located.

I remained at school there three months, the length of the winter term,
and studied fairly hard. I had a room by myself and enjoyed the life
with the two hundred or more boys and girls of my own age. I studied
algebra, geometry, chemistry, French, and logic, wrote compositions, and
declaimed in the chapel, as the rules required. It was at this time that
I first read Milton. We had to parse in "Paradise Lost," and I recall
how I was shocked and astonished by that celestial warfare. I told one
of my classmates that I did not believe a word of it. Among my teachers
was a young, delicate, wide-eyed man who in later life became well known
as Bishop Hurst, of the Methodist Church. He heard our small class in
logic at seven o'clock in the morning, in a room that was never quite
warmed by the newly kindled fire. I don't know how I came to study logic
(Whately's). I had never heard of such a study b