Besides giving to the United States her great president, Abraham Lincoln, the year 1809 also bestowed upon us one of the most gifted and warmly esteemed of American authors, Oliver Wendell Holmes. It was in a pleasant home in Cambridge, not far from the great university in which he was to serve ably for so many years, that Holmes was born. His mother was a bright and sociable little woman, well liked for her lively ways and quick sympathy, and his father, though a grave and scholarly man, was of a kindly nature. Both parents were descended from families that were looked upon as among the best in New England, and this became a matter of no little pride to their son. The old colonial house where his boyhood and youth were spent contained a well-chosen library. Here, he has written, "he bumped about among books from the time when he was hardly taller than one of his father's or grandfather's folios." Yet he did not read many of these volumes thoroughly. He liked to "read _in_ books rather than _through_ them" and would hunt out a paragraph here and there that especially pleased and satisfied him. The collections of sermons were always passed by, the lives of pious children met with the same neglect, and even _The Pilgrim's Progress_ seemed to picture the world as such a cruel, gloomy place that this great book too was shunned. [Illustration: OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 1809-1894] The truth was that, being a lively and cheerful boy, he rebelled against the dark and fear-awakening religion preached by his father, a Congregational minister, discussed by visiting pastors and taught in many of the books that he avoided in the library. He seemed to know by instinct which of the clergymen who called at his father's home were kindly and friendly, and which of them looked on children as "a set of little fallen wretches," and for the forlorn looks and solemn ways of the latter he had an especial dislike. "Now and then," he has written, "would come along a clerical visitor with a sad face and a wailing voice, which sounded exactly as if somebody must be lying dead upstairs, who took no interest in us children, except a painful one, as being in a bad way with our cheery looks, and did more to unchristianize us with his woebegone ways than all his sermons were like to accomplish in the other direction." In fact, he might have pleased his father by becoming a minister if a certain preacher that he knew had not, to use his own words, "looked and talked so like an undertaker."