The next thing that I remember, as an event in my childhood, was the funeral of General Ashley, one of our townsmen, who had served as colonel, I think, in the War of the Revolution. I was then in my sixth year. It was a military funeral; and the procession, for a long distance, filled the wide street. The music, the solemn march, the bier borne in the midst, the crowd! It seemed to me as if the whole world was at a funeral. The remains of Bonaparte borne to the Invalides amidst the crowds of Paris could not, [14] I suppose, at a later day, have affected me like that spectacle. I do not certainly know whether I heard the sermon on the occasion by the pastor, the Rev. Ephraim Judson; but at any rate it was so represented to me that it always seems as if I had heard it, especially the apostrophe to the remains that rested beneath that dark pall in the aisle. "General Ashley!" he said, and repeated, "General Ashley!--he hears not." To the recollections of my childhood this old pastor presents a very distinct, and I may say somewhat portentous, figure, tall, large-limbed, pale, ghostly almost, with slow movement and hollow tone, with eyes dreamy, and kindly, I believe, but spectral to me, coming into the house with a heavy, deliberate, and solemn step, making me feel as if the very chairs and tables were conscious of his presence and did him reverence; and when he stretched out his long, bony arm and said, "Come here, child!" I felt something as if a spiritualized ogre had invited me. Nevertheless, he was a man, I believe, of a very affectionate and tender nature; indeed, I afterwards came to think so; but at that time, and up to the age of twelve, it is a strict truth that I did not regard Mr. Judson as properly a human being,--as a man at all. If he had descended from the planet Jupiter, he could not have been a bit more preternatural and strange to me. Indeed, I well remember the occasion when the idea of his proper humanity first flashed upon [15] my mind. It was when I saw him, one day, beat the old black horse he always rode, apparently in a passion like any other man. The old black horse--large, fat, heavy, lazy--figures in my mind almost as distinctly as its master; and if, as it came down the street, its head were turned aside towards the school-house, as indicating the rider's intent to visit us, I remember that the school was thrown into as much commotion as if an armed spectre were coming down the road. Our awe of him was extreme; yet he loved to be pleasant with us. He would say,--examining the school was always a part of his object, "How much is five times seven?" "Thirty-five," was the ready answer. "Well," replied the old man, "saying so don't make it so"; a very significant challenge, which we were ill able to meet. At the close of his visit he always gave an exact and minute account of the Crucifixion,--I think always, and in the same terms. It was a mere appeal to physical sympathy, awful, but not winning.