There is an old tale of a boy who was told by his parents, who did not want him to cling any longer to the old myth about Santa Claus, that it was not Santa Claus that brought him all the good things on Christmas, but that they, his parents, had been giving him the presents year after year. The boy turned to his mother and said: "Have you been fooling me about the God question too?" CHAPTER III MY BOYHOOD ON A FARM 1833-1843 The old house where I spent these years of my childhood and boyhood is now more than two hundred years old. It was the home of the old Methodists in that section, and had been the headquarters of the sect for a hundred years before it began to have regular "conferences." Here lived the slave-owner Pickering, who married my grandmother, the farmer's daughter. If it had not been for this home, which was a refuge and asylum for the itinerant preacher, grandfather Pickering would have starved. The farm was his anchorage. Otherwise he would have gone adrift. A religious atmosphere pervaded the place. It left the deepest impress upon my mind. The only paper we took was Zion's Herald, a religious weekly published by Stevens, of Boston. The difference between this calm, religious life of the Methodists and the turbulent, rough, and swearing life of the fo'cas'le was very marked. But it took me a long time to get away from the atmosphere of the fo'cas'le and into that of the Methodists. Even the bath and the clean clothes did not seem to change me very much. I discovered that cleanliness is not so very near to godliness, after all. Of course the old Methodists had prayers in the morning and at night, and they had grace at every meal. Every one knelt at prayers. But they could not make me kneel. I would not bow the knee. I had not got over the sailors' ways, and the monkeys, and the throwing down sugar from the plantation in the sails--the Santa Claus part of it. I always remembered it. Of course I was taken to the little church, a mile off up in the woods, where my grandfather preached. It was in his "circuit." As we were coming home one day, and I was driving, the chaise struck a stone, and the old gentleman was jostled considerably. He impatiently seized the reins from me and gave the horse a severe flip with them, and drove the rest of the way himself. The little incident made a deep impression on my mind. I said to myself: "If this is the way Christians act, I do not want to have anything to do with them."