“My earliest remembered sermons were delivered at Northbridge, Mass., where I taught school for three months in 1831. I conducted conference meetings almost every night, and a temperance address at Upton, Mass., where old Father Wood was pastor, and in his church. In the winter of 1832 I taught school in Hopkinton, Mass., and carried on revival meetings every night and preached on Sundays. The people were plain and simple and liked the effusions. During the winter of 1833 I again taught school at Northbridge, and made a formal sermon in a chapel over the new store built by Messrs. Whitings.” It was in his Sophomore year that a number of students, Henry Ward among them, invited a college mate who had been reading up on phrenology to deliver a lecture upon that subject. They did it for a joke, but it ended in Henry Ward’s accepting this philosophy as the foundation of the mental science which he used through life. It was during his college course that he began lecturing—that mode of communication with the people that afterwards became so popular, and in which for so many years he was the acknowledged leader. His first formal lecture for which he received pay was delivered in Brattleboro’, Vt. He was paid ten dollars, and walked the whole distance, nearly fifty miles each way, that he might have the whole sum to expend as he pleased. Speaking of this period, he says: “There stands before me a line of battered and worn books—English classics. Their history is little to them, but much to me. In part it is my own history. I wish I could lay my hand on the _first_ book that I ever bought after the dim idea of a library began to hover in my mind! But that book is gone. Here, however, are others whose biography I can give. As early as 1832 I began to buy books—a few volumes, but each one a monument of engineering. My first books, if I remember correctly, were bought of J. S. & C. Adams, in Amherst, Mass. I used to go in there and look wistfully at their shelves. My allowance of money was very small—scarcely more than enough to pay my postage, when a letter cost twelve and a half or twenty-five cents. To take a two or three-dollar book from my five dollars of spending-money would have left me in a state of sad impecuniosity. Therefore, for many, many months I took it out in looking.