when narrow means and a crude provincialism combined to make New England life unlovely. Prescott was not only an able lawyer, the worthy compeer of Dexter, Otis, and Webster--he was a scholar by instinct, widely read, thoughtful, and liberal-minded in the best sense of the word. His intellectual conflicts with such professional antagonists as have just been named gave him mental flexibility and a delightful sanity; and though in temperament he was naturally of a serious turn, he had both pungency and humour at his command. No more ideal father could be imagined for a brilliant son; for he was affectionate, generous, and sympathetic, with a knowledge of the world, and a happy absence of Puritan austerity. He had, moreover, the very great good fortune to love and marry a woman dowered with every quality that can fill a house with sunshine. This was Catherine Hickling, the daughter of a prosperous Boston merchant, afterward American consul in the Azores. As a girl, and indeed all through her long and happy life, she was the very spirit of healthful, normal womanhood,--full of an irrepressible and infectious gayety, a miracle of buoyant life, charming in manner, unselfish, helpful, and showing in her every act and thought the promptings of a beautiful and spotless soul. It was of this admirably mated pair that William Hickling Prescott, their second son, was born, at Salem, on the 4th of May, 1796. The elder Prescott had not yet acquired the ample fortune which he afterward possessed; yet even then his home was that of a man of easy circumstances,--one of those big, comfortable, New England houses, picturesquely situated amid historic surroundings.[2] Here young Prescott spent the first twelve years of his life under his mother's affectionate care, and here began his education, first at a sort of dame school, kept by a kindly maiden lady, Miss Mehitable Higginson, and then, from about the age of seven, under the more formal instruction of an excellent teacher, Mr. Jacob Newman Knapp, quaintly known as "Master Knapp." It was here that he began to reveal certain definite and very significant traits of character. The record of them is interesting, for it shows that, but for the accident which subsequently altered the whole tenor of his life, he might have grown up into a far from admirable man, even had he escaped moral shipwreck. Many of his natural traits, indeed, were of the kind that need restraint to make them safe to their possessor, and in these early years restraint was largely lacking in the life of the young Prescott, who, it may frankly be admitted, was badly spoiled. His father, preoccupied in his legal duties, left him in great part to his mother's care, and his mother, who adored him for his cleverness and good looks, could not bear to check him in the smallest of his caprices. He was, indeed, peculiarly her own, since from her he had inherited so much. By virtue of his natural gifts, he was, no doubt, a most attractive boy.