Page:Letters of Life.djvu/26

14 cruel Benedict Arnold! At which the boy secretly laughed.

It was customary, in those days of republican simplicity, for merchants' clerks, who were received into the household of the master, to take part in a variety of services for the comfort of the family. Conformably to this custom, Benedict was sometimes despatched to a mill at the distance of about two miles, carrying, on the horse that he rode, bags of Indian corn to be transmuted into meal. There, while waiting, he amazed the miller with sundry fantastic tricks. Sometimes his affrighted eyes would descry the urchin clinging to a spoke of the great mill-wheel in its revolutions, now submerged and anon flying through the air for his amusement, heeding no remonstrance, and enjoying the terror of the honest man, who in his objurgations was wont to style him an "imp of the Evil One."

In this reckless daring and deficiency of moral sensibility, might be traced the elements of that character which afterwards, with equal hardihood, could lead his soldiers through perils in the wilderness, or aim a traitor's blow at the heart of his endangered country.

My father had several books of elementary science in his possession, among which I particularly recollect a Dilworth's Grammar and an Arithmetic, which bore in multifarious places the sobriquet of Benedict Arnold, scrawled heedlessly and often with blots through the middle of mathematical problems or examples of