”... I find it hard to keep as a Christian ought to. To be sure, I find delight in prayer, but I cannot find time to be alone sufficiently. We have in our room only two, one besides myself, but he is most of my play-hours practising on some instrument or other. I have some time, to be sure, but it is very irregular, and I never know when I shall have an opportunity for private devotions until the time comes. I do not like to read the Bible as well as to pray, but I suppose it is the same as it is with a lover, who loves to talk with his mistress in person better than to write when she is afar off.... “Your affectionate brother, “HENRY.” His religious experience, of which we have heard nothing since he left Litchfield, the life in Boston apparently not being very favorable to it, again attracts our attention at this point. He says: “When I was fourteen years of age I left Boston and went to Mount Pleasant. There broke out while I was there one of those infectious religious revivals which have no basis of judicious instruction, but spring from inexperienced zeal. It resulted in many mushroom hopes, and I had one of them; but I do not know how or why I was converted. I only know I was in a sort of day-dream, in which I hoped I had given myself to Christ. “I wrote to father expressing this hope; he was overjoyed, and sent me a long, kind letter on the subject. But in the course of three or four weeks I was nearly over it; and I never shall forget how I felt, not long afterward, when a letter from father was handed me in which he said I must anticipate my vacation a week or two and come home and join the Church on the next Communion Sabbath. The serious feelings I had were well-nigh gone, and I was beginning to feel quite jolly again, and I did not know what to do. I went home, however, and let them take me into the Church. A kind of pride and shamefacedness kept me from saying I did not think I was a Christian, and so I was made a church-member.” In an editorial in the _Independent_, written in 1862, upon the disbanding of this old church, the Bowdoin Street—originally Hanover Street—Church, Boston, he describes this event: