Salient among my recollections of this period are the cries and wailing of a newly-born babe in the rooms at the academy occupied by the principal, and adjacent to our big school-room. Several decades of years later I had the honor of speaking on the platform of Cooper Institute in company with this babe, who, as I write, is, I believe, the very energetic Secretary of War in the Cabinet of President McKinley. Unfortunately for me, Mr. Root was soon afterward called away to a professorship at Hamilton College, and so, though living in the best of all regions for geological study, I was never properly grounded in that science, and as to botany, I am to this hour utterly ignorant of its simplest facts and principles. I count this as one of the mistakes in my education,--resulting in the loss of much valuable knowledge and high pleasure. As to physical development, every reasonable encouragement was given to play. Mr. Allen himself came frequently to the play-grounds. He was an excellent musician and a most helpful influence was exerted by singing, which was a daily exercise of the school. I then began taking lessons regularly in music and became proficient enough to play the organ occasionally in church; the best result of this training being that it gave my life one of its deepest, purest, and most lasting pleasures. On the moral side, Mr. Allen influenced many of us by liberalizing and broadening our horizon. He was a disciple of Channing and an abolitionist, and, though he never made the slightest attempt to proselyte any of his scholars, the very atmosphere of the school made sectarian bigotry impossible. As to my general education outside the school I browsed about as best I could. My passion in those days was for machinery, and, above all, for steam machinery. The stationary and locomotive engines upon the newly- established railways toward Albany on the east and Buffalo on the west especially aroused my attention, and I came to know every locomotive, its history, character, and capabilities, as well as every stationary engine in the whole region. My holiday excursions, when not employed in boating or skating on the Onondaga Creek, or upon the lake, were usually devoted to visiting workshops, where the engine drivers and stokers seemed glad to talk with a youngster who took an interest in their business. Especially interested was I in a rotary engine on ``Barker's centrifugal principle,'' with which the inventor had prom- ised to propel locomotives at the rate of a hundred miles an hour, but which had been degraded to grinding bark in a tannery. I felt its disgrace keenly, as a piece of gross injustice; but having obtained a small brass model, fitted to it a tin boiler and placed it on a little stern-wheel boat, I speedily discovered the secret of the indignity which had overtaken the machine, for no boat could carry a boiler large enough to supply steam for it.