that I heard, and so eager my desire to learn to know the world.

Then I was removed, and with good cause, from Mr. Alcott's school, for he
had become so very "ideal" or eccentric in his teaching and odd methods
of punishment by tormenting without ever whipping, that people could not
endure his purely intellectual system. So for one winter, as my health
was bad and I was frequently ill, for a long time I was allowed to do
nothing but attend a writing-school kept by a Mr. Rand. At the end of
the season, he sadly admitted that I still wrote badly; I think he
pronounced me the worst and most incurable case of bad writing which he
had ever attended. In 1849 Judge (then Mr.) Cadwallader, with whom I was
studying law, said that he admired my engrossing hand more than any he
had ever seen except one. As hands go round the clock, our hands do
change.

I was to go the next summer to New England with my younger brother, Henry
Perry Leland, to be placed in the celebrated boarding-school of Mr.
Charles W. Greene, at Jamaica Plains, five miles from Boston; which was
done, and with this I enter on a new phase of life, of which I have very
vivid reminiscences. Let me state that we first went to Dedham and
stayed some weeks. There I found living with his father, an interesting
boy of my own age, named William Joshua Barney, a grandson of the
celebrated Commodore Barney, anent whom was written the song, "Barney,
leave the girls alone," apropos of his having been allowed to kiss Marie
Antoinette and all her maids of honour. William had already been at Mr.
Greene's school, and we soon became intimate.

During this time my father hired a chaise; I borrowed William's shot-gun,
and we went together on a delightful tour to visit all our relations in
Holliston, Milford, and elsewhere. At one time we stopped to slay an
immense black snake; at another to shoot wild pigeons, and "so on about"
to Providence and many places. From cousins who lived in old farmhouses
in wild and remote places I received Indian arrow-heads and a stone
tomahawk, and other rustic curiosities dear to my heart. At the Fremont
House in Boston my father showed me one day at dinner several foreign
gentlemen of different nations belonging to different Legations. In
Rhode Island I found by a stream several large pot-holes in rocks of
which I had read, and explained to my father (gravely as usual) how they
were made by eddies of water and gravel-stones. One day my