“The boys must go to college, and leave the little boy to go to infant school, to Miss Bull, and learn to tell the hour on a card clock, and add, subtract, and count with an abacus. Henry in the world of departed spirits, Amherst; Charles at Bowdoin. Every morning father praying for our boys at college: ‘May they become good ministers of our Lord Jesus Christ!’ ”... Edward was a man, like father. But Henry and Charles were heroes, doing things. How they could jump! How they whirled around the horizontal bar! How Charles could flog a top! And Henry had peanuts and red peppermints. Shall I ever be big and do things, and run to fires, and go way down Milk Street? “Yes, one vacation brother Henry took the little boy down on Milk Street, past two Unitarian churches safely, past Tremont Theatre, past an open stable-door where lay a red cow with monstrous horns, chewing her big mouth with nothing in it, and looking, oh! so strong and hungry at that little boy. But Henry wasn’t scared. He was whistling. ‘Come along, Tom,’ he said, ‘that’s only a cow.’ “Henry and Charles at college; father and eight of us staging from Boston to Cincinnati, leaving my heroes. Amherst and Bowdoin loom large in my fancy still. My heroes were to stay and grow! Tidings once a month: Charles has a fiddle, Henry has a six-keyed flute; Charles, and something about circles and geometry; Henry, and phrenology and temperance lectures.” Such was his life in Boston, undoubtedly to a certain extent beneficial, and, by reason of the activity of the streets of the city and the bustle of the wharves, attractive. But coming at the turbulent period of his own development, when the rough elements of its thoroughfares were more congenial to him than the influences of its churches, libraries, or homes, it was far from being satisfactory. Its liberty was not altogether safe, nor were its restrictions healthful; and he says: “I cannot see how, if I had remained much longer in Boston, I could have escaped ruin.” We see him, therefore, start off on the lumbering stage-coach, in the early autumn morning before daylight, for Amherst, with a sense of relief and hearty thankfulness that he is escaped as a bird from the snare of the fowler. CHAPTER VI. School-Life at Mount Pleasant—Mathematics—Elocution—Testimony of Classmates—Religious Experiences—Troubles—A Romantic Friendship—Another Kind—Letter of Reminiscence—A Royal School-boy.