ce, peace and abolition on
Sunday afternoons following the morning services in his neighboring
parish, the Hopedale Community. As my family was attached to the Baptist
and Methodist persuasions I cannot now imagine what drew them to hear
this famous reformer of society and religion. They must have attended in
this hall, for although I cannot recall anything else, I do remember
going to sleep there in the hot summer afternoons in my sister's lap.
But any kind of a meeting was a temptation not to be resisted in that
little community. Adin Ballou was in full sympathy with all the other
reformers and transcendentalists of the Commonwealth, and when I search
myself for an explanation of my early and intuitive attraction to their
ideals I sometimes fancy they must have visited me in my sleep in that
old hall; or perhaps I heard something which lay like a seed in the
unconscious, secret recesses of my being until time and favoring
circumstances called it forth. For I find it recorded, that he fired his
hearers with aspirations for "grand objects and noble ideas."

Regarding the topography of Bellingham, the most that can be said is,
that it has none, none that distinguishes it either by lakes or hills.
The best soil is in the northern and southern parts of the town and
along the valley of the Charles river. The white oaks were once the most
abundant of the deciduous trees. They seem to love a lean and stubborn
soil. I have seen graves laid open to a considerable depth where oaks
had once stood, and still uncovering nothing but coarse gravel. I have
talked with ancient well-diggers who declared that the bottom of
Bellingham was just like the top and only good for grey birch and beans.
Yet they may not have dug after all to the veins which supply the floral
and arboreal life of the earth. A poor soil is usually porous, admitting
more wholesome air and sunshine, and it is through these vital forces
that trees and men grow taller and hardier. Thus do I like to compensate
the sterile fields of my native place by their stalwart, thin,
straight-backed citizens, all bone and muscle, living with undimmed eyes
and ears to ripe old age, mowing their meadows to the last summer of
their lives and dying conveniently in some winter month when work was
slack.

The dial of my childhood marked none but sunny days; the dry air and
drier earth of Bellingham gave me health and strength. I never found any
road in the town too long for my walking i