supported by Providence, to whom I
looked with serene complacence. If my companion had not deserted me I
should not have turned back, but his defection destroyed all my plans.
In several of my maturer ventures, I can recognize the same mental
condition of serene indifference to danger while doing what I thought
my duty, owing, perhaps, in a great measure to ignorance or incapacity
to realize the danger, but also largely to ingrained confidence in an
overruling Providence which took account of my steps and would carry
me through.

CHAPTER III

AN AMERICAN EDUCATION

Whether on account of the escapade related in the preceding chapter
or from influences of which I knew, and still know, nothing, it was
decided not long after that I should go to New York to attend a public
school there and live with my eldest brother, who, being twenty-five
years older than myself, and childless, had always treated me with an
indulgence which was perhaps due in part to the rigor of my father's
rule, and in part to his fondness for me, of which I retain some early
recollections in his annual visits home. My brother's wife, a fellow
townswoman of ours, and a marriage-convert to the Seventh Day Baptist
Church, was one of the most disagreeable persons I have ever had to
deal with, and hysterical to a degree of occasional insanity. She had
adopted the severities of our Puritanic system with aggravations. The
Sabbath under her rule became a day of preatonement for the sins I was
foreordained to commit. Dinner, as was the general custom in those
days, was at noon, but on Saturday I had none till I had committed to
heart and recited a portion of Scripture, and as the mental apathy
of the period still weighed on me, the task of the Seventh Day was a
sarcastic comment on the divine rest, in commemoration of which it was
supposed to be instituted, and it made me grateful for the Sunday,
which I generally passed in mechanical occupations in the workshop of
my third brother, Paul, the foreman of the department in which the
minor articles of the works were made, steam-gauges, models of
inventions, etc., and as I had my share of the family manual
dexterity, I found interest enough in the workshop. As my brothers
always observed the Sabbath rigidly, they attracted around them a few
of the New England mechanics who were "Sabbath-keepers" and mostly
related to us, and so we had a small congregation and a church of our
way of thinking.

The scho