As a boy he was frenzied at the first sight of the sea; caught the whip and lashed the horses in an unconscious delirium, and always remembered this as one of the most vivid experiences of his life. He had a period of nature worship. His first trout was a delirium, and he danced about wildly and furiously. He relates his very vivid impressions of the religious orthodoxy in which he was reared, especially revival sermons; his occasional falsehoods to escape severe punishment; his baptism at ten or eleven in a river in midwinter; the somberness of his intellectual life, which was long very apathetic; his phenomenal stupidity for years; his sudden insurrections in which he thrashed bullies at school; his fear that he should be sent home in disgrace for bad scholarship; and how at last, after seven years of dulness, at the age of fourteen, "the mental fog broke away suddenly, and before the term ended I could construe the Latin in less time than it took to recite it, and the demonstrations of Euclid were as plain and clear as a fairy story. My memory came back so distinctly that I could recite long poems after a single reading, and no member of the class passed a more brilliant examination at the end of the term than I; and, at the end of the second term, I could recite the whole of Legendre's geometry, plane and spherical, from beginning to end without a question, and the class examination was recorded as the most remarkable which the academy had witnessed for many years. I have never been able to conceive an explanation of this curious phenomenon, which I record only as of possible interest to some one interested in psychology." A. Bronson Alcott[43] was the son of a Connecticut farmer. He began a diary at twelve; aspired vainly to enter Yale, and after much restlessness at the age of nineteen left home with two trunks for Virginia to peddle on foot, hoping to teach school. Here he had a varying and often very hard experience for years. Hornes Bushnell's[44] parents represented the Episcopal and liberal Congregational Church. His early life was spent on a farm and in attending a country academy. He became profoundly interested in religion in the early teens and developed extreme interest in nature. At seventeen, while tending a carding machine, he wrote a paper on Calvinism. At nineteen he united with the church, and entered Yale when he was twenty-one, in 1823. Later he tried to teach school, but left it, declaring he would rather lay stone wall; worked on a journal, but withdrew, finding it a terrible life; studied law for a year, became a tutor at Yale, experienced a reconversion and entered the ministry. A well-known American, who wishes his name withheld, writes me of his youth as follows: