orn and discarded
clerical vestments, which to some extent may account for my otherwise
inexplicable distaste for things ecclesiastical. My mother was
poor, after wedlock, owing to the eccentricity of a parent who was
so inexorably opposed to religion that he cut her off with a shilling
upon her marriage to my father. Before this she had had and done
what she chose, as was fitting for a daughter of a substantial
citizen who had made a fortune in shoe leather.

I remember that one of my first experiments upon taking up the
study of law was to investigate by grandfather's will in the probate
office, with a view to determining whether or not, in his fury
against the church, he had violated any of the canons of the law
in regard to perpetuities or restraints upon alienation; or whether
in his enthusiasm for the Society for the Propagation of Free
Thinking, which he had established and intended to perpetuate, he
had not been guilty of some technical slip or blunder that would
enable me to seize upon its endowment for my own benefit. But the
will, alas! had been drawn by that most careful of draughtsmen,
old Tuckerman Toddleham, of 14 Barristers' Hall, Boston, and was
as solid as the granite blocks of the court-house and as impregnable
of legal attack as the Constitution.

We lived in a frame house, painted a disconsolate yellow. It
abutted close upon the sidewalk and permitted the passer-by to view
the family as we sat at meat or enjoyed the moderate delights of
social intercourse with our neighbors, most of whom were likewise
parishioners of my father.

My early instruction was received in the public schools of my native
town, supplemented by tortured hours at home with "Greenleaf's
Mental Arithmetic" and an exhaustive study of the major and minor
prophets. The former stood me in good stead, but the latter I fear
had small effect. At any rate, the impression made upon me bore
little fruit, and after three years of them I found myself in about
the same frame of mind as the Oxford student who, on being asked
at his examination to distinguish between the major and minor
prophets, wrote in answer: "God forbid that I should discriminate
between such holy men!"

But for all that I was naturally of a studious and even scholarly
disposition, and much preferred browsing among the miscellaneous
books piled in a corner of the attic to playing the rough-and-tumble
games in which my school-mates indulged.

My father was a