So joined these—the stepmother, the mother, the humble servant in the family, Charles Smith the happy Christian black man, Aunt Esther, and the father—hand-in-hand with nature, with the life and events that were moving on around them, and with God, in directing and moulding him in every part in these early years. There were none of them, perhaps, unusual, certainly not unprecedented; for others besides Henry Ward Beecher have had heavenly-minded and large-hearted mothers; others, as well as he, have been trained in conscientiousness and have had a happy Christian example set before them, and have enjoyed the influence of fathers full of manly inspiration, while God and nature have been with and around them, and yet no such marked results have been seen as in him. Something native there was in the soil that enabled it to respond to such genial influences with such unusual fruitage. We are driven, in accounting for this, to that especial endowment that was given to him and withheld from others through the will of One who gives to every man according to His own good pleasure. “And to one He gave five talents.” His appearance and attainments at this time are thus summed up by Mrs. Stowe: “Henry was now ten years old, a stocky, strong, well-grown boy, loyal to duty, trained in unquestioning obedience, inured to patient hard work, inured also to the hearing and discussing of all the great theological problems of Calvinism which were always reverberating in his hearing;... but as to any mechanical culture, in an extremely backward state, a poor writer, a miserable speller, with a thick utterance, and a bashful reticence which seemed like stolid stupidity.... “He was not marked out by the prophecies of partial friends for any brilliant future. He had precisely the organization which often passes for dulness in early boyhood. He had great deficiency in verbal memory—a deficiency marked in him through life. He was excessively sensitive to praise and blame, extremely diffident, and with a power of yearning, undeveloped emotions which he neither understood nor could express. His utterance was thick and indistinct, partly from bashfulness and partly from an enlargement of the tonsils of the throat, so that in speaking or reading he was with difficulty understood. In forecasting his horoscope, had any one taken the trouble then to do it, the last success that ever would have been predicted for him would have been that of an orator! ‘When Henry is sent to me with a message,’ said a good aunt, ‘I always have to make him say it three times. The first time I have no manner of an idea more than if he spoke in Choctaw; the second I catch a word now and then; by the third time I begin to understand.’”