first pet. He used to come and sleep in my pocket, and was
never kept in a cage. My father one morning left the window of our
room open, and "Bob" went out to explore, but, when he tried to find
his way back again, a dog of the neighborhood, as a neighbor told us,
chased him away, and to my intense grief he was shot by a hunter a
few days after in the adjoining forest. I cannot to this day see a
squirrel without emotion and affectionate remembrance of "Bob." The
love of animals, which I inherited from my father, was one of the
passions of my childhood, and I had an insatiate longing for pets.

Naturally my religious education during these early years was of the
severest orthodox character, and my mother's sincere, fervent, and
practical piety brought home to me, with the conviction of certainty,
the persuasion of its divine authority. Hell and its terrors were
always present to me, and she taught me that the wandering suggestions
of childish imagination, the recurrence of profane expressions heard
from others, and all forms of irreverent fantasies were the very
whisperings of the devil, to her, as to me, consequently, an
ever-present spirit, perpetually tempting me to repeat, and so make
myself responsible for the wickedness in them. I remember with great
vividness a caricature of Mrs. Trollope in a satirical illustrated
edition of her travels in America, representing her sitting in a
large armchair surrounded by negroes on their knees, one of whom was
represented as saying, "De Lord lub Missee Trollope," an expression
which my mother stigmatized as impious and not to be repeated, but
which perhaps for that very reason would recur to me in thought, and
which I set myself to pray against as the very whisper of the devil in
my ears. And naturally, the more I tried to put it out of my head, the
more it got fixed there, and it was long a source of great misery to
me that I could not keep the devil away from my ears. I was never
allowed a candle to go to bed with, and as I slept in the huge garret,
covering the whole house, I used to shut my eyes when I left the
kitchen, where we all sat in the evening, and groped my way to bed
without ever again opening my eyes until the next morning, for fear
of seeing the devil on my way. Awful spiritual presences haunted
me always in the dark, when I passed a churchyard or an empty and
solitary house. Such a house stood in the pasture where I used to
drive the cow, and when it happened