s of
the latter he had an especial dislike. "Now and then," he has written,
"would come along a clerical visitor with a sad face and a wailing
voice, which sounded exactly as if somebody must be lying dead upstairs,
who took no interest in us children, except a painful one, as being in a
bad way with our cheery looks, and did more to unchristianize us with
his woebegone ways than all his sermons were like to accomplish in the
other direction." In fact, he might have pleased his father by becoming
a minister if a certain preacher that he knew had not, to use his own
words, "looked and talked so like an undertaker."

But the dreary sermons, the visits of the long-faced clergymen and the
drill in the Catechism were only shadows that came and went. Most of the
time young Holmes was as light-hearted a boy as was to be found in all
New England. He liked best of all to go hunting, carrying on such trips
an old gun of the kind used in the Revolution. A good many of his hours
at home were spent in working with tools, and thus he became skilful
enough to carve out of wood a skate on which he learned to travel about
on the ice. He was active and industrious at school, too, and he made
such a good record there that though he whispered a great part of the
time he got along peaceably with the school-master. The only serious
troubles that he had came from two great fears. Many times after he had
gone to bed at night he would be awakened by ghosts or evil spirits
mysteriously roaming through the house. Perhaps he was ashamed to tell
of this dread to his mother or father, and so the foolish belief that
there might be ghosts about stayed with him through boyhood. His other
fear was of the doctor's visits. In helpless terror he would look on
while the old physician pronounced his doom and began to measure out the
bitter medicine.

In his fifteenth year Holmes left the school at Cambridgeport to attend
Phillips Academy, at Andover, and in the following year, 1825, entered
Harvard College. During his four years at Harvard he took quite as
active an interest in the social life of the college as in his classes.
He joined the society known as the Knights of the Square Table, and at
the lively meetings of the club, where wine and wit passed freely about
the table, he was introduced to a kind of gayety undreamed of in his
quiet home. In a humorous description of himself, given at this time in
a letter to a former classmate at Andover, he writes