Page:John Brown (W. E. B. Du Bois).djvu/31

Rh friend tempted him. He knew nothing of games or sports; he had few or no companions, but, "to be sent off through the wilderness alone to very considerable distances was particularly his delight. By the time he was twelve years old he was sent off more than a hundred miles with companies of cattle." So his soul grew apart and alone and yet untrammeled and unconfined, knowing all the depths of secret self-abasement, and the heights of confident self-will. With others he was painfully diffident and bashful, and little sins that smaller souls would laugh at and forget loomed large and awful to his heart-searching vision. John had "a very bad foolish habit. I mean telling lies, generally to screen himself from blame or from punishment," because "he could not well endure to be reproached and I now think had he been oftener encouraged to be entirely frank  he would not have been so often guilty of this fault, nor have been (in after life) obliged to struggle so long with so mean a habit."

Such a nature was in its very essence religious, even mystical, but never superstitious nor blindly trustful in half-known creeds and formulas. His family was not rigidly Puritan in its thought and discipline but had rather fallen into the mild heathenism of the hard-working frontier until just before John's birth. Then, his father relates in quaint Calvinistic patois: "I lived at home in 1782; this was a memorable year, as there was a great revival of religion in the town of Canton. My mother and