The superintendent was a young man named Henry Pitkin. He was a few years older than the boys. I cannot now remember what he did on week-days; we never thought of him as working, or wearing old clothes, or doing anything except being superintendent of the Sunday-school. I presume he is dead, poor fellow, for I know he was always sickly,—at least, that is what we boys thought. I believe he was threatened with consumption, and I heard people speak of him with pity and say what a nice young man he was. I never knew him to take part in our games, or to go swimming or fishing, or anything of that kind. I cannot remember that he was cross or unkind, or what we boys called mean; but still I know we never talked so loud, and were always a little more particular, and sometimes stopped our games, when he came along the road. I am sure we felt sorry for him, and thought he never had any fun. He was always dressed up, even when it was not Sunday; and he never went barefooted, or shouted, or made any kind of jokes. I know that I often saw him go up to the church, to the Thursday evening prayer-meetings, in the summer-time. He would walk past us while we were playing ball on the square in the long twilight. None of us could understand why he went to prayer-meeting on Thursday night. None of us really knew what prayer-meeting was. We never had to go to church any day but Sunday, and although our curiosity was strong it never led us to go to the Thursday evening prayer-meeting. Everybody who went seemed awfully old, except Henry, and we never understood how he could go. Sometimes we met him going to the preacher’s for an evening visit, and this seemed still stranger. None of us boys ever went for an evening visit anywhere; and if we had gone we never would have thought of going to the preacher’s,—he was so old and solemn, and we were sure that if we ever went there he would talk to us about religion. Our fathers and mothers and the grown-up people were always telling us what a good boy Henry was, and asking us why we didn’t do things the way he did. Of course, we couldn’t do as he did, no matter how hard we tried. In the Sunday-school Henry always told us what to sing; he would talk to us softly and quietly, and he never scolded the least bit. He always asked us to be good, and told us how much happier we would be if we learned lots of verses, and never called bad names, or fought, and always tried to do right. Henry told us all about the lesson papers, and seemed to know everything there was in the Bible, and all about Damascus and Jericho and those foreign cities that are in the Bible. Then he used to give out the Sunday-school books. We usually took one of these home with us, but we never cared much about them. The stories were all rather silly, and didn’t amount to much.