After about six months, Henry was returned on his parents' hands with the reputation of being an inveterate joker, and an indifferent scholar. It was the opinion of his class that there was much talent lying about loosely in him if he could only be brought to apply himself. When he was twelve years of age his father moved to Boston. It was a great change to the two younger boys, from the beautiful rural freedom of a picturesque mountain town to the close, strait limits of a narrow street in Boston. There was a pure and vigorous atmosphere of moral innocence about the mountain towns of Connecticut in those days, which made the breeding up of children on the let-alone system quite feasible. There was no temptation to vice or immorality. The only associate of doubtful character forbidden to Henry, for whose society he craved, was Ulysses Freeman, a poor, merry, softly giggling negro boy, who inhabited a hut not far off, and who, it was feared, might indiscreetly teach him something that he ought not to know--but otherwise it was safe to let him run unwatched, in the wholesome companionship of bob-o'links and squirrels and birch woods and huckleberry bushes. There was not in all Litchfield in those days any thing to harm a growing boy, or lead him into evil. But in Boston, the streets, the wharves, the ship yards, were full of temptation--the house, narrow and strait. The boy was put into the Boston Latin School, where the whole educational process was a solid square attempt to smite the Latin grammar into minds of all sorts and sizes, by a pressure like that by which coin is stamped in the mint. Educated in loyal obedience as a religion and a habit, pushed up to make the effort by the entreaties of his father, by appeals to his gallantry in overcoming difficulties, his sense of family honor, and the solemn appeals to conscience of his mother, Henry set himself doggedly to learn lists of prepositions and terminations, and bead-rolls of nouns that found their accusatives or genitives in this way or that, except in the case of two dozen exceptions, when they formed them in some other way, with all the other dry prickly facts of language with which it is deemed expedient to choke the efforts of beginners. It was to him a grim Sinaitic desert, a land of darkness without order, where he wandered, seeing neither tree or flower; a wilderness of meaningless forms and sounds. His life was a desolation, a blind push to do what was most contrary to his natural faculties, repulsive to his tastes, and in which with utmost stress and strain of effort he could never hope to rise above mediocrity. One year passed in this way, and with the fear of disgrace in the rear and conscience and affection goading him on, Henry had actually mastered the Latin grammar, and could give any form or inflection, rule or exception therein, but at an expense of brain and nerve that began to tell even on his vigorous organization.