If his nature lay in strata, as has been said—the one a dreamy, yearning melancholy lying at the bottom, which had its full exercise in his lonely wanderings around Bethlehem; and the other, the surface one, of humor and fun—it was the latter, constantly effervescing and exploding, that appeared in his life in his sister’s school of thirty or forty girls in Hartford. The story of his arranging the umbrellas on the stairs one recess, when he was supposed to be studying grammar, so that when the outside door was opened by a late comer the whole series rushed pell-mell down into the street, greatly to the dismay of the teachers and the enjoyment of the school—with whom, of course, he was a great favorite—is well known. And one of the incidents of the recitation-room is equally familiar, but, as it is very characteristic, we give it place, copied verbatim from Mrs. Stowe: “The school-room was divided into two divisions in grammar, under leaders on either side, and the grammatical reviews were contests for superiority in which it was vitally important that every member should be perfected. Henry was generally the latest choice, and fell on his side as an unfortunate accession, being held more amusing than profitable on such occasions. “The fair leader of one of these divisions took the boy aside to a private apartment, to put into him with female tact and insinuation those definitions and distinctions on which the honor of the class depended. “‘Now, Henry, _a_ is the indefinite article, you see, and must be used only with a singular noun. You can say _a man_, but you can’t say _a men_, can you?’ ‘Yes, I can say _amen_, too,’ was the ready rejoinder. ‘Father says it always at the end of his prayers.’ “‘Come, Henry, now don’t be joking! Now decline he.’ ‘Nominative he, possessive his, objective him.’ ‘You see _his_ is possessive. Now, you can say his book, but you can’t say him book.’ ‘Yes, I do say hymn-book, too,’ said the impracticable scholar, with a quizzical twinkle. Each one of these sallies made his young teacher laugh, which was the victory he wanted. ‘But now, Henry, seriously, just attend to the active and passive voice. Now, I strike is active, you see, because if you strike you do something. But I am struck is passive, because if you are struck you don’t do anything, do you?’ “‘Yes, I do—I strike back again!’” A letter from the afore-mentioned teacher, sent to him with her New Year’s salutation, January 1, 1858, has lately come to hand. She says, in recalling this incident: “Memory has daguerreotyped upon my mind a boy, a small specimen of perpetual motion, perpetual prank, and perpetual desire to give wrong answers to every sober grammatical rule, thereby not only overwhelming Murray but the studious gravity of a hundred school-girls.”