In the old kitchen, a pair of deer's horns fastened into the wall held the long-barrelled musket which his grandfather had carried in the campaign of 1777. A round beaver hat, bullet, button, and spoon moulds, and home-made pewter spoons and buttons, were among other things which impressed themselves upon the sensitive films of the child's memory. Following out the usual small boy's instinct of destruction, he once sallied out down to the "karsey" (causeway) to spear frogs with a weapon made by his brother. It was a sharpened nail in the end of a broomstick. Stepping on a log and making a stab at a "pull paddock," he slipped and fell head foremost into the mud and slime. Scrambling out, he hied homeward, and entering the parlor, filled with company, he was greeted with shouts of laughter. Even worse was it to be dubbed by his brother and the hired man a "mud lark." Carleton's first and greatest teachers were his mother and father. After these, came formal instruction by means of letters and books, classes and schools. Carleton's religious and dogmatic education began with the New England Primer, and progressed with the hymns of that famous Congregationalist, Doctor Watts. When five years old, at the foot of a long line of boys and girls, he toed the mark,--a crack in the kitchen floor,--and recited verses from the Bible. Sunday-school instruction was then in its beginning at Boscawen. The first hymn he learned was: "Life is the time to serve the Lord." After mastering "In Adam's fall We sinned all," the infantile ganglions got tangled up between the "sleigh" in the carriage-house, and the act of pussy in mauling the poor little mouse, unmentioned, but of importance, in the couplet: "The cat doth play, And after slay." Having heard of and seen the sleigh before learning the synonym for "kill," the little New Hampshire boy was as much bothered as a Chinese child who first hears one sound which has many meanings, and only gradually clears up the mystery as the ideographs are mastered. From the very first, the boy had an ear sensitive to music. The playing of Enoch Little, his first school-teacher, and afterwards his brother-in-law, upon the bass viol, was very sweet. Napoleon was never prouder of his victories at Austerlitz than was little Carleton of his first reward of merit. This was a bit of white paper two inches square, bordered with yellow from the paint-box of a beautiful young lady who had written in the middle, "To a good little boy."