Of the bashfulness referred to in the above he says: “We had our own fill of it in childhood. To walk into a room where ‘company’ was assembled, and to do it erectly and naturally, was as impossible as it would have been to fly. The sensations of sensibility were dissolving. Our back-bone grew soft, our knees lost their stiffness, the blood rushed to the head, and the sight almost left our eyes. We have known something of pain in after-years, but few pangs have been more acute than some sufferings from bashfulness in our earlier years.” Healthy, robust, frolicksome, conscientious, obedient, loving, and efficient, but bashful in the extreme and backward in all his studies, is the summing-up that we must make of Henry Ward Beecher at this period of his life. CHAPTER IV. Boyhood—Sent to School at Bethlehem—The Widow Ingersoll’s—Failure—A Champion—Sent to Catharine Beecher’s School in Hartford—Humorous Incidents—Religious Experience. To remedy the marked defects in his training, noticed in the preceding chapter, something must be done, or this boy will fail not only of becoming a student but of acquiring even a decent common-school education. Mr. Brace’s select school was tried for a year, but with little benefit. After a good many family discussions and some correspondence it was decided to place him in a private school in the village of Bethlehem, seven miles distant from his home, under the care of Mr. Langdon, to begin study in earnest. Of this important era, his first going from home, we have not a syllable, as we are aware, from his own pen or lips. That there was a mingled feeling of pain at leaving home, of pleasure in the novelty, and a shrinking from the new faces and the new duties, every one who remembers this epoch in his own life can readily imagine. The ride, for a large part of the distance across a broad plateau that stretched away cold and strange like the Downs of England, was well calculated to awaken that yearning sadness which was so prominent a feature of his secret experiences from childhood, and gave in part that tone of melancholy which appears so markedly in everything that we know of him at this period. Singularly enough, he boarded with the grandmother of the one who afterwards became his son-in-law and is now aiding to write this biography. Her name was Ingersoll, and she is well described as a “large-hearted, kindly woman, a widow, living in a great, comfortable farm-house where everything was free and unconstrained.” He was well remembered by my mother, Mrs. Martha Ingersoll Scoville, who, being somewhat older than he, had him much under her care. She said he was always a good boy about the house, but very bashful. “I used to feel very sorry for him, he seemed so homesick. He liked to be off by himself, wandering around in the woods, and I don’t think he studied much.” [Illustration: The Ingersoll House.]