, and when duty entered her head there was no force
capable of driving it out. Charles, the first of us to graduate,
became the college bell-ringer, to pay his fees, but Jacob and myself
were in turn excused, even from this service. My father's practical
opposition, the refusal to pay the incidental expenses for what he
always persisted in regarding as a useless education, was met, in
Charles's case, by my mother's taking in the students' washing, to
provide them. In the cases of Jacob and myself, this drudgery was
exchanged for that of a students' boarding-house.

In all the housework involved in this complication of her duties, she
never had a servant until shortly before my birth, when she took into
the house a liberated African slave, the only other assistance in the
house, in my childhood, being a sister six years older than myself and
the daughter of one of our neighbors, who came as a "help" at the time
of my birth, and subsequently married my second brother. My mother was
also the family doctor, for, except in very grave cases, we never
had any other physician. She pulled our teeth and prescribed all our
medicines. I was well grown before I wore a suit which was not of her
cutting and making, though sometimes she was obliged to have in a
sewing-woman for the light work. She made all the bread we ate, cured
the hams, and made great batches of sausages and mincemeat for pies,
sufficient for the winter's consumption, as well as huge pig's-head
cheeses. How she accomplished all she did I never understood.

But with all her passionate desire to see one of her boys in what she
considered the service of God, there was never, on my mother's
part, the least pressure in that direction, no suggestion that the
sacrifices she was making demanded any measure of deviation from our
views as to the future. It was her hope that one of us would feel as
she did, but she cheerfully resigned the hope, as son after son turned
the other way. A boy who was born three years before me, and whose
death occurred before my birth, was, perhaps, in her mind, the
fulfillment of her dedication, for he was, according to the accounts
of friends of the family, a child of extraordinary intelligence, and
she felt that God had taken him from her. In one of those moments
of confidence, in the years when I had become a counselor to her, I
remember her telling me of this boy (known in the family as "_little_
William," to distinguish him from me), and th