stablishment, and probably a
pet of the larger girls, for he remembers going home to his mother in
tears, because one of them had kissed him behind the class-room door.
He saw her often, in later years, but she never tried to do it again!

[Illustration: "CRIED, BECAUSE HE HAD BEEN KISSED"]

At that school he met his first love, one Phoebe Hawkins, a very sweet,
pretty girl, as he recalls her, and, of course, considerably his senior.
How far he had advanced in the spelling of proper names at that period
is shown by the well-authenticated fact that he put himself on record,
once as "loving his love with an F, because she was Feeby!"

Poor Phoebe Hawkins died before she was out of her teens. The family
moved to Poughkeepsie when The Boy was ten or twelve, and his mother and
he went there one day from Red Hook, which was their summer home, to
call upon his love. When they asked, at the railroad-station, where the
Hawkinses lived and how they could find the house, they were told that
the carriages for the funeral would meet the next train. And, utterly
unprepared for such a greeting, for at latest accounts she had been in
perfect health, they stood, with her friends, by the side of Phoebe's
open grave.

In his mind's eye The Boy, at the end of forty years, can see it all;
and his childish grief is still fresh in his memory. He had lost a bird
and a cat who were very dear to his heart, but death had never before
seemed so real to him; never before had it come so near home. He never
played "funeral" again.

In 1851 or 1852 The Boy went to another dame's school. It was kept by
Miss Kilpatrick, on Franklin or North Moore Street. From this, as he
grew in years, he was sent to the Primary Department of the North Moore
Street Public School, at the corner of West Broadway, where he remained
three weeks, and where he contracted a whooping-cough which lasted him
three months. The other boys used to throw his hat upon an awning in the
neighborhood, and then throw their own hats up under the awning in order
to bounce The Boy's hat off--an amusement for which he never much cared.
They were not very nice boys, anyway, especially when they made fun of
his maternal grandfather, who was a trustee of the school, and who
sometimes noticed The Boy after the morning prayers were said. The
grandfather was very popular in the school. He came in every day,
stepped upon the raised platform at the principal's desk, and said in
his broad Scotc