ristian ought to. To be sure, I
find delight in prayer, but I cannot find time to be alone
sufficiently. We have in our room only two, one besides myself, but he
is most of my play-hours practising on some instrument or other. I
have some time, to be sure, but it is very irregular, and I never know
when I shall have an opportunity for private devotions until the time
comes. I do not like to read the Bible as well as to pray, but I
suppose it is the same as it is with a lover, who loves to talk with
his mistress in person better than to write when she is afar off. . . .

Your affectionate brother,
HENRY.

His religious experience, of which we have heard nothing, since he left
Litchfield, the life in Boston apparently not being very favorable to
it, again attracts our attention at this point. He says:

"When I was fourteen years of age, I left Boston and went to Mount
Pleasant. There broke out while I was there one of those infectious
religious revivals which have no basis of judicious instruction, but
spring from inexperienced zeal. It resulted in many mushroom hopes,
and I had one of them; but I do not know how or why I was converted. I
only know I was in a sort of day-dream, in which I hoped I had given
myself to Christ.

"I wrote to father expressing this hope; he was overjoyed, and sent me
a long, kind letter on the subject. But in the course of three or four
weeks I was nearly over it; and I never shall forget how I felt, not
long afterward, when a letter from father was handed me in which he
said I must anticipate my vacation a week or two and come home and join
the Church on the next Communion Sabbath. The serious feelings I had
were well-nigh gone, and I was beginning to feel quite jolly again, and
I did not know what to do. I went home, however, and let them take me
into the Church. A kind of pride and shamefacedness kept me from
saying I did not think I was a Christian, and so I was made a Church
member."

In an editorial in the _Independent_, written in 1862, upon the
disbanding of this old church, the Bowdoin Street--originally Hanover
Street--Church, Boston, he describes this event:

"If somebody will look in the old records of Hanover Street Church
about 1829 they will find a name there of a boy about fifteen years old
who was brought into the Church on a sympathetic wave, and who well
remembers how cold and almost paralyzed he felt while the committee
questioned him about his 'hope'