Early Glimpses—Recollections of the Mother—Going to School at Ma’am Kilbourne’s—His First Letter—District School—The Coming of the New Mother—His First Ride on Horseback—A Merry Household—Fishing Excursions—Minister’s Wood-Spell—Saturday Night—Going to Meeting—The Puritan Sabbath—The Cold of Litchfield Hill—Rats—Work—The Catechism—Formative Influences—Summing Up. We of course see but little of him in these early years. “The younger members of the Beecher family came into existence in a great, bustling household of older people, all going their several ways and having their own grown-up interests to carry. “The child growing up in this busy, active circle had constantly impressed upon it a sense of personal insignificance as a child, and the absolute need of the virtue of passive obedience and non-resistance as regards all grown-up people. To be statedly washed and dressed and catechised, got to school at regular hours in the morning and to bed inflexibly at the earliest possible hour at night, comprised about all the attention that children could receive in those days.” Here and there a glimpse is given, just enough to tell us the direction the stream is taking. The first is found in a letter of the mother to her sister, Harriet Foote, written when he was a little more than a year old: “_July 12, 1814._—... I arrived Saturday at sunset, and found all well, and boy (Henry Ward) in merry trim, glad at heart to be safe on terra firma after all his jolts and tossings.” Again in November of the same year: “I write sitting upon my feet with my paper on the seat of a chair, while Henry is hanging round my neck and climbing on my back.” He himself gives an experience of a little later period: “I remember very well when I was but two years old (strange as it may seem; sometimes I think I spent all my remembering power on that early period!) finding myself in the east entry of my father’s great house, alone, coming down-stairs, or trying to. The sudden sense which I had of being alone frightened me, and I gave one shriek; and then the echo of my voice scared me worse, and I gave another shriek that was more emphatic; and I remember seeing the light stream in from the dining-room, and being taken up by loving hands. The face I do not recall, the form I do not recall; but I remember the warm pressure. It was my mother, who died when I was three years old. She took me to her bosom. I recollect sitting by the side of some one who made me feel very happy; and I recollect seeing my father’s swart face on the other side of the table. “Now I could not paint my mother’s face; but I know how her bosom felt. I know how her arms felt. I have a filial sense, a child’s interpretation, of motherhood. It was only an emotion or instinct in me, but it was blessed.” This incident of the mother is supplemented by two of the sister Harriet, in which the little boy Henry had a part: