Page:A new England boyhood by Hale, Edward Everett.djvu/27

Rh the peace with England. He grew up in the very purest conditions of the simplest and, indeed, the best life of New England. His father had been for eight years the minister of a frontier town, Westhampton, in the days when the minister was chosen by the town in open town meeting, was paid by the town, and regarded himself as personally responsible for the moral and spiritual life of every body in the town.

Hoeing corn or potatoes one day in the summer of 1800, my father, a boy of sixteen, was called into his father's study, where he found Dr. Fitch, then the president of Williams College, which had been established as a college seven years before. Dr. Fitch had stopped in a journey across country, to accept the hospitalities of the parsonage. The boy was told to show Dr. Fitch how well he could read Latin; then he read to him from the Greek Testament, and Dr. Fitch said he was ready to enter Williams College. His father and he had not expected that he would enter until the next year. But this fortunate visit of the president carried him to Williamstown