Page:The Hope of the Great Community (1916).djvu/141

 the task of keeping still for an hour. The training was needed, but it was never wholly effective in suppressing for any great length of time the dialectical insistence.

I was not a very active boy. I had no physical skill or agility. I was timid and ineffective, but seem to have been, on the whole, prevailingly cheerful, and not extremely irritable, although I was certainly more or less given to petty mischief, in so far as my sisters did not succeed in keeping me under their kindly watch.

Since I grew during the time of the civil war, heard a good deal about it from people near me, but saw nothing of the consequences of the war through any closer inspection, I remained as vague about this matter as about most other life problems, — vague but often enthusiastic. My earliest great patriotic experience came at the end of the civil war, when the news of the assassination of Lincoln reached us. Thenceforth, as I believe, I had a country as well as a religious interest. Both of these were ineffective interests, ex-