To take up again the thread of my story, I pass from childhood to my youth. My winters, up to the age of about sixteen, were given to [26] school,--the common district-school,--and my summers, to assisting my father on the farm; after that, for a year or two, my whole time was devoted to preparing for college. For this purpose I went first, for one year, to a school taught in Sheffield by Mr. William H. Maynard, afterwards an eminent lawyer and senator in the State of New York. He came among us with the reputation of being a prodigy in knowledge; he was regarded as a kind of walking library; and this reputation, together with his ceaseless assiduity as a teacher, awakened among us boys an extraordinary ambition. What we learned, and how we learned it, and how we lost it, might well be a caution to all other masters and pupils. Besides going through Virgil and Cicero's Orations that year, and frequent composition and declamation, we were prepared, at the end of it, for the most thorough and minute examination in grammar, in Blair's Rhetoric, in the two large octavo volumes of Morse's Geography, every fact committed to memory, every name of country, city, mountain, river, every boundary, population, length, breadth, degree of latitude,--and we could repeat, word for word, the Constitution of the United States. The consequence was, that we dropped all that load of knowledge, or rather burden upon the memory, at the very threshold of the school. Grammar I did study to some purpose that year, though never before. I lost two years of my childhood, I think, upon that study, absurdly [27] regarded as teaching children to speak the English language, instead of being considered as what it properly is, the philosophy of language, a science altogether beyond the reach of childhood. Of the persons and circumstances that influenced my culture and character in youth, there are some that stand out very prominently in my recollection, and require mention in this account of myself.