Page:Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs (Volume One).djvu/43

Rh a remark of his made many years after: That he would prefer the worst hell to annihilation, which he believed would be his fate.

I learned to read by standing in front of my mother as she read the Bible. Of course all the letters were inverted, and the faculty of reading an inverted page, has remained.

I went to the District School summer and winter, until I was ten years of age, and to the winter school until I passed my seventeenth birthday, when my school life ended. My father and mother were scrupulous about my attendance, and I cannot recall that I was ever allowed to be absent during the school term either for work or pleasure.

When I reached the age of ten years I was kept on the farm during the summer months, until I left home in December, 1830. In those days farmers’ boys did not enjoy the luxury of shoes in the summer, nor indeed in the autumn season. More than once I picked chestnuts bare-footed and often have I tended the oxen in the mowing field frosty mornings and warmed my feet by standing on a stone.

Once only during my home life did I go to Boston with my father. He carried poultry in a one-horse wagon. I accompanied him. The year may have been 1828, or ’9 or ’30. On our way he stopped at one of the Waltham cotton factories to see a niece of my father who was there at work. We lodged that night at the house of Madam Coffin. She was then already old in my sight. She seemed pleased with my father’s visit, and the impression left upon my mind is that we were entertained with marked consideration. My father had managed her farm for about five years from 1809 to 1814, when he volunteered for service in the army, and for ninety days he was on the island then known as Fort Warren.

The next morning we reached Boston and stationed our wagon at the northwest corner of Quincy Market, where we