Page:A new England boyhood by Hale, Edward Everett.djvu/30

xx high rank in the mathematics of those days, and was afterward quite the peer in those lines of the engineers with whom he worked on the great public works of which he had the charge. He studied some Hebrew in college, and could always read a little. I asked him once if this was with any thought of being a minister, but he said, "No, but there was nothing else to study." He had to learn his French and German afterward, and did. I think that in my boyhood there were more German books in our house than perhaps in any other house in Boston. But. that is saying very little; as late as 1843 I could buy no German books, even in Pennsylvania, but Goethe and Schiller and the Lutheran hymn-book.

After a year in Troy he received the appointment of preceptor in mathematics in Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. He crossed Massachusetts to Boston on his way to Exeter. Here is a memorandum of the way in which this was done:

The arrangement of the stages was that if the stages coming from Springfield and Northampton had more