“... Henry is a very good boy, and we think him a remarkably interesting child, and he grows dearer to us every day. He is very affectionate, and seems to love his father with all his heart. His constant prattle is a great amusement to us all. He often speaks of his sister Harriet, and wishes spring would come, so that she might come home and go to school with him.” This was in the winter when he was past three years old. Perhaps the prattle of this one will be instructive as well as amusing some day. Who knows? At last spring comes, and with it his sister Harriet from her long visit at Nutplains, and an important era in his life opens. He begins to go to school, with her as his companion and guardian. He is just four years old that summer, the usual age for school beginnings in rural New England. They went to Ma’am Kilbourne’s on West Street, and there he clambered up the first rounds of the ladder of book-learning and took his first lessons. These consisted in repeating his letters twice a day, such as he could remember, and having the others pointed out to him from Webster’s spelling-book, as he stood, a chubby, bare-footed, round, rosy-faced boy, in front of the dreaded schoolma’am, who had been made sharp and angular by her years of labor in sharpening the intellectual faculties of generations of children. In due time Charles is large enough to join the older brother and sister, and tells us: “I remember all three of us coming out of our yard and stringing along, holding each other by the hand and saying every morning, ‘What if a great big dog should come out at us?’ and Henry, as the larger brother and protector of the group, answering, ‘I would take an axe and chop his head off.’” As yet he wears his hair in long golden curls, the badge of a continued infantile state; but some of the girls at school improvising a pair of shears from the pieces of tin thrown out from a shop near by, and cutting off some of the coveted locks, it is thought best at home to cut them all off; and now, with trousers, and suspenders, and jacket, and short hair, and bare feet, he emerges from the half-infantile, girlish state and becomes a full-fledged boy, much to his own satisfaction: “he considered that his manhood had now commenced.” That the instruction of his teacher is not all thrown away is evident by the letter which he wrote at this time, when he was five years old, of which a facsimile is given. Its merits of directness and originality, at least in the matter of spelling, will be readily recognized: [Illustration: DER SISTER WE AR AL WEL MA HAZ A BABY THE OLD SOW HAZ SIX PIGS ] One incident of about these times, which is related by his brother, is ludicrously prophetic: “I remember Henry’s coming in and taking his turn” (reading to Aunt Esther). “Once the piece was about wild beasts, and it said ‘two monstrous lions came out.’ I can see Henry’s red face and declamatory air as he read it ‘two monstrofalous great lions came out.’”