Another influence we must not forget, and that was, being let alone. “I think,” he says, “that I was about as well brought up as most children, because I was let alone. My father was so busy and my mother had so many other children to look after that, except here and there, I hardly came under the parental hand at all. I was brought up in a New England village, and I knew where the sweet-flag was, where the hickory-trees were, where the chestnut-trees were, where the sassafras-trees were, where the squirrels were, where all things were that boys enterprise after, therefore I had a world of things to do, and so I did not come much in contact with family government.” “Nobody,” so says his sister, “thought much of his future, further than to see that he was safe and healthy, or even troubled themselves to inquire what might be going on in his life.” Some of the reminiscences of this period now given in his own words are interesting, not only from the wide field which they cover, but from the revelation they make of the susceptibility of his nature to outside influences. Of “going to meeting” he discourses in this wise: “The coming on of Saturday night was always a serious business with the youngsters. We had no stores of religious experience on which it is presumed the old folks meditated, and the prospect of a whole day without anything in it to interest us was not a little gloomy. On no night of the week did the frogs croak so dismally, or the tree toads whistle in a mood so melancholy, as on Saturday night. “But those blazing summer mornings! What a wealth of light spread over that blessed old hill-top! What a wondrous silence dwelt in the great round heavens above our head! The birds sang on. The crows in the distance called out to each other in hoarse discourse. The trees stood in calm beauty—the great elm-trees, tall, pliant, graceful, the perfection of strength and beauty. All this we saw and heard while buttoning up our Sunday clothes by the side of the open window. For the cow and horse had been foddered, and the pigs fed, and all the barn chores done up, and a bountiful breakfast eaten, and our face and hands washed, and every article of apparel, from shoe to hat, had changed from a secular to a sacred use. Not the every-day hat, soft, shapeless, universal instrument, used as a liquid or solid measure; used now for the head, and now for a football; used for a net to catch butterflies or to throw at wasps—no, not this bag, pocket, hat, pouch, and magazine, but the Sunday hat, round, stiff, hard, and respectable. “Although the new hat was always disagreeable to our head, yet we had a wonderful reverence for it, and spent no inconsiderable portion of our time in church in getting it dirty and then brushing it clean.