My mother came with her parents to Oneida County and the Sauquoit Valley when only a few years old.[7] Her father there joined a company which set up an iron-forge. One of the early pieces of work of its trip-hammer was to forge off three of my maternal grandfather’s fingers. This appears to have qualified him to be the cleric in charge, or manager, of the office and store of the Paris Furnace Company, which established a small iron-smelting furnace on the Sauquoit, two and a half miles above the village of Sauquoit, in a deep and narrow valley which had the name of Paris Furnace Hollow, now called Clayville, the furnace long since having disappeared, a natural consequence of the exhaustion of the charcoal furnished by the woods of the surrounding hills. My earliest recollections are of Paris Furnace Hollow, for not long after I was born, as aforesaid, in Sauquoit, on the eastern or Methodist side of the creek, on the 18th of November, 1810, my father and mother removed to Paris Furnace with me, their first-born, and set up a small tannery there. Of this I retain some vivid recollections, especially those connected with the first use to which I was put, the driving round the ring of the old horse which turned the bark-mill, and the supplying the said mill with its grist of bark,--a lonely and monotonous occupation.[8] I was sent to the district school near by when three years old; and I either remember some of my performances of that or the next year, or have been told them in such way as to leave the matter doubtful.[9] My earliest distinct recollections of school are of spelling-matches, in which at six or seven years I was a champion.[10] There was a year or two of early boyhood in which I was sent to a small “select” or private school, taught at Sauquoit, by the son of the pastor of the parish; a year or two following, in which I was in my maternal grandfather’s family, near by, as a sort of office-boy; and at the age of twelve, or near it, I was sent off to the Clinton Grammar School, nine miles away, where I was drilled after a fashion in the rudiments of Latin and Greek for two years, excepting the three summer months, when I was taken home to assist in the corn and hayfield. For my father, buying up, little by little, lands which had been cleared for charcoal, had become a farmer in a small way, an occupation to which he was most inclined. So about these times he sold out the tannery and bought a small farm nearer to Sauquoit, mainly of the land which my maternal grandfather had settled on, including the house in which he had married my mother. To it he removed, and there resided until he bought out an adjacent small farm in addition, with an old house very pleasantly situated, which he rebuilt and lived in until after I had attained my majority. But soon after that he bought a small farm close to the Sauquoit village on the western or Presbyterian side, hard by the meeting-house the family had always attended. There my father indulged