dred feet north of my present residence, and the office of
Dr. Amos was on the spot now occupied by the front of my house. At the
close of business for the day, nine o'clock in the evening, I was in
the habit of going to the office and reciting my Latin lesson, after
which we discussed other matters. Upon my return to the store, I
prepared myself for the next evening's recitation. In this way I read
Caesar and Virgil. In a closet in Bancroft's office there was a
skeleton. That skeleton had a history, and possibly there may be a
sequel to it. It was understood to have been the skeleton of a man
named Jack Frost, who was tried, convicted and executed at Worcester
for the crime of murder committed at or near Princeton. Dr. Bancroft,
Sr., had been the owner of the skeleton. Oftentimes I rode Sundays
with Dr. Amos. On the occasion of one of these drives, and after the
death of Dr. Bancroft, Sr., we passed the house of a waggish old man
named Asa Tarbell. After a little conversation Tarbell said, "I shall
be over soon for Frost's skeleton." Dr. Amos, amazed, looked over and
through his glasses, and said, at length: "Why, what do you mean?"
Said Tarbell: "Some years ago, your father and I were playing, and I
proposed to put my uncle Ben against your Frost. Your father agreed to
the game, and I won. I told him I had no use for Frost at that time,
and that he might keep him." Tarbell's Uncle Ben was a man of inferior
size, hardly more than a dwarf, who had been a drummer boy in the
Revolution.

I bought the Bancroft estate in 1873, and my foreman, Mr. William A.
Chase informed me that he had found a skeleton, in a barrel in a shed,
and that he had buried it on the place. If again found it may lead to
the suspicion that it is the skeleton of a murdered man, and not that
of a murderer.

From 1835 to 1841, I read Locke, Say's Political Economy, Smith's
Wealth of Nations, Plutarch, Josephus, Herodotus, Lingard, Hume and
Smollett, Cicero, Demosthenes, Homer, Pope, Byron, Shakespeare,
Boswell's Johnson, Junius, The Tattler, The Rambler, the English
Reviews, French from text-books without a teacher and Rhetoric (Blair's
full edition). Much of Blair's Rhetoric I studied carefully and with
great benefit. Some of my papers of those days were written and re-
written four times. On the law side I read a few text-books:
Blackstone, Story on the Constitution, The Federalist, De Lohme on the
British Constitution, and some