It must not be supposed that young Willard's home was gloomy and joyless, because it was presided over by a religious woman. The Presbyterians of that day and that race were by no means a lugubrious people. They did not necessarily view their lives as a mere vale of tears, nor did they think the "night side of nature" the most sacred one. The Rev. Mr. Morrison, one of their divines, tells us that "the thoughtless, the grave, the old and the young, alike enjoyed every species of wit," and though they were "thoughtful, serious men, yet they never lost an occasion that might promise sport," and he very pertinently asks, "what other race ever equaled them in getting up corn-huskings, log-rollings and quiltings?--and what hosts of queer stories are connected with them!" Fond of fun, there was a grotesque humor about them, which in its way has, perhaps, never been equaled. "It was the sternness of the Scotch Covenanter softened by a century's residence abroad, amid persecution and trial, united to the comic humor and pathos of the Irish, and then grown wild in the woods among their own New England mountains." [Illustration: The First Battle.] Such was the Scotch-Irish Presbyterianism of that period. Other cheerful influences were also at work in the two villages that comprised the town of Fowler. The only house of worship in the town proper was a Universalist church, and the people were compelled for the most part, notwithstanding their various creeds, to worship in a common temple where the asperities of sectarian difference had no existence. Ward Glazier, at that time, was an adherent of Universalism, while his wife held evangelical views. But he was ever ready to ride with his wife and son to the church of her choice at Gouverneur, a distance of six miles, and returning, chat with them pleasantly of the sermon, the crops, the markets and the gossip of the town. In truth, young Willard's early home was a good and pleasant one, and having learned, under his mother's careful training, to read exceedingly well, for a boy of his age, by the time he reached his fourth year he became noted for his inquiring disposition, his quiet manner, and a quaint habit of making some practical application of the "wise saws" with which his mother had stored his juvenile mind. The result was that up to this period of his existence he was an old-fashioned little fellow, and somehow had acquired the sobriquet of the "little deacon." At about five years of age, however, a change took place in the boy. The bird that flutters and twitters in the parent nest is a very different thing from the emancipated fledgeling, feeling its newly acquired power of flight, and soaring far up and out into the woods and over the fields; and the boy whose experience of life is confined to the household of his parents, is not less different from the lad who has gone beyond it into the bustle and turmoil of that epitomized world,--a public school.