Such were the influences which surrounded Willis’s early years. And if, at the first touch of the world, the youthful members of the household flew off like the dry seeds of the _Impatiens_, it need not therefore be hastily concluded that the home training, though perhaps too repressive and severe, was without lasting effect for good. Among the children and grandchildren of Nathaniel Willis are Catholics, Episcopalians, Unitarians, and representatives of other shades of belief and unbelief. But this is the history of many a New England Puritan family, and such are the disintegrating forces of American life. In the case of the eldest brother, it may be affirmed that, from a career which was certainly worldly, and in some of its aspects by no means edifying, the light that shone from his mother’s face uplifted in prayer for him never altogether faded away. Willis began school life under the tuition of the Rev. Dr. McFarland, of Concord, New Hampshire. “I have forgotten every circumstance,” he wrote long after, “of a year or two that I was at school at Concord, New Hampshire, when a boy, except the natural scenery of the place. The faces of my teacher and my playmates have long ago faded from my memory, while I remember the rocks and eddies of the Merrimac, the forms of the trees on the meadow opposite the town, and every bend of the river’s current.” Later he was brought home and sent to the Boston Latin School, then under “its well-remembered Pythagoras, Ben Gould.” A few reminiscences of his slate-and-satchel days are scattered here and there through his writings. Thus he vaguely recalled Ralph Waldo Emerson as “one of the boys whose fathers were Unitarians,” and he was greatly impressed by Edward Everett, then a young Harvard professor, whose stylishly dressed figure used to appear occasionally in Atkinson Street, at No. 31, in which thoroughfare the Willises dwelt. He remembered “the rousings before daylight,” on May-day, “to go to Dorchester Heights, and the shivering search after never found green leaves and flowers; the buttoning up of boy-jacket to keep out the cold wind, and pulling out of penknife to cut off the bare stems of the sweet-brier in search of the hidden odor of the belated bud.” In “The Pharisee and the Barber,” one of the two or three stories of Willis whose scenes are laid in Boston, the description of Sheafe Lane is evidently from the life. The Pharisee of that tale, Mr. Flint, an “active member of a church famed for its zeal,” who “dressed in black, as all religious men must (in Boston),” was doubtless a sketch from memory of some pious familiar of his father’s house, whose black eyes and formal talk left upon the lad a mixed impression of awe and distrust.