_Merchants' Magazine_. From 1835 to 1841 I occupied the store night and day and it was my custom to read and write until twelve, one or two o'clock in the morning. These were my years of hard study. Not infrequently, when a tendency to sleep was too heavy for study, I bathed my face and head in cold water and thus revived my faculties--a practice, however, that I cannot commend. Early in my residence in Groton, I formed the acquaintance and friendship of Dr. Amos B. Bancroft, a friendship which continued until his death in Italy in the year 1879. It was with Dr. Bancroft that I continued my studies in Latin. In 1835, he had finished his professional studies with Dr. Shattuck, of Boston, then an eminent physician. Dr. Shattuck had studied his profession with Dr. Amos Bancroft, the father of Amos B. Dr. Amos, as he was called, was a graduate of Harvard College in the class of Wendell Phillips, and at the close of his professional studies he was spoken of as the best educated physician who had entered the profession in Boston. At the time our acquaintance began, he was entering upon the practice of medicine, at Groton, in place of his father, who was then about sixty- five years of age, deaf, and not healthy in other respects, although he lived to the age of eighty years, and then died from an accident in State Street, Boston. Dr. Bancroft, Sr., lived in a house which stood about one hundred feet north of my present residence, and the office of Dr. Amos was on the spot now occupied by the front of my house. At the close of business for the day, nine o'clock in the evening, I was in the habit of going to the office and reciting my Latin lesson, after which we discussed other matters. Upon my return to the store, I prepared myself for the next evening's recitation. In this way I read Caesar and Virgil. In a closet in Bancroft's office there was a skeleton. That skeleton had a history, and possibly there may be a sequel to it. It was understood to have been the skeleton of a man named Jack Frost, who was tried, convicted and executed at Worcester for the crime of murder committed at or near Princeton. Dr. Bancroft, Sr., had been the owner of the skeleton. Oftentimes I rode Sundays with Dr. Amos. On the occasion of one of these drives, and after the death of Dr. Bancroft, Sr., we passed the house of a waggish old man named Asa Tarbell. After a little conversation Tarbell said, "I shall be over soon for Frost's skeleton." Dr. Amos, amazed, looked over and through his glasses, and said, at length: "Why, what do you mean?" Said Tarbell: "Some years ago, your father and I were playing, and I proposed to put my uncle Ben against your Frost. Your father agreed to the game, and I won. I told him I had no use for Frost at that time, and that he might keep him." Tarbell's Uncle Ben was a man of inferior size, hardly more than a dwarf, who had been a drummer boy in the Revolution.