nature of a sport. It seems as if I had more intellectual capital than I was entitled to and robbed some of the rest of the family, while I had a full measure of the family weaknesses. I can remember how abashed I used to be as a child, when strangers or relatives, visiting us for the first time, after looking the rest of the children over, would ask, pointing to me: "That is not your boy. Whose boy is that?" I have no idea how I looked different from the others, because I can see the family stamp upon my face very plainly. My face resembles Hiram's more than any of the others, and I have a deeper attachment for Hiram than for any of the rest of my brothers. Hiram was a dreamer, too, and he had his own idealism, which expressed itself in love of bees, of which he kept many hives at one time, and of fancy stocksheep, pigs, poultry-and a desire to see other lands. His bees and fancy stock never paid him, but he always expected they would the next year. But they yielded him honey and wool of a certain intangible, satisfying kind. To be the owner of a Cotswold ram or ewe for which he had paid one hundred dollars or more, gave him rare satisfaction. One season, in his innocence, he took some of his fancy sheep to the state fair at Syracuse, not knowing that an unknown outsider stood no chance at all on such an occasion.

Hiram always had to have some sort of a plaything. Though no hunter and an indifferent marksman, yet he had during his life several fancy rifles. Once when he came to Washington to visit me he brought his rifle with him, carrying the naked weapon in his hand or upon his shoulder. The act was merely the whim of a boy who likes to take his playthings with him. Hiram certainly had not come to "shoot up" the town. In the early 'fifties he had a fifty-dollar rifle made by a famous rifle maker in Utica. There was some hitch or misunderstanding about it and Hiram made the trip to Utica on foot. I was at home that summer and recall seeing him start

off one June day, wearing a black coat, bent on his fifty-mile walk to see about his pet rifle. Of course nothing came of it. The rifle maker had Hiram's money and he put him off with fair words; then something happened and the gun never came to Hiram's hand.

Another plaything he had was a kettledrum with which he amused himself in the summer twilight for many seasons. Then he got a bass drum, which Curtis learned to play, and a very warlike sound often went up from the peaceful old homestead. When I was married and came driving home one October twilight with my wife, the martial music began as soon as we hove in sight of the house. Early in the Civil War Hiram seriously talked of enlisting as a drummer, but father and mother dissuaded him. I can see what a wretched, homesick boy he would have been before one week had passed. For many years he was haunted with a desire to go west, and made himself really believe that the next month or the month after he would go. He kept his valise packed under his bed for more than a year, to be ready when the impulse grew strong enough. One fall it became strong enough to start him and carried him as far as White Pigeon, Michigan, where it left him stranded. After visiting a cousin who lived there, he came back, and thenceforth his western fever assumed only a low, chronic type.

I tell you all these things about Hiram because I am a chip out of the same block and see myself in him. His vain regrets, his ineffectual resolutions, his daydreams, and his playthings-do I not know them all? Only nature in some way dealt a little more liberally with me and made many of my dreams come true. The dear brother! He stood next to father and mother to me. How many times he broke the path for me through the winter snows on the long way to school! How faithful he was to write to me and to visit me wherever I was, after I left home! How he longed to follow my example and break away

from the old place, but could never quite screw his courage up to the sticking point! He never read one of my books, but he rejoiced in all the good fortune that was mine. Once when I was away at school and fell short of money Hiram sent me a small sum when father could or would not. In later life he got it paid back manifold, and what a satisfaction it was to me to thus repay him!

Hiram was always a child; he never grew up, which is true of all of us, more or less, and true of father also. I was an odd one, but I shared all the family infirmities. In fact, I have always been an odd one amid most of my human relations in life. Place me in a miscellaneous gathering of men, and I separate from them or they from me, like oil from water. I do not mix readily with my fellows. I am not conscious of drawing into my shell, as the saying is, but I am conscious of a certain strain put upon me by those about me. I suppose my shell or my skin is too thin. Burbank experimented with walnuts, trying to produce one with a thin shell, till he finally produced one with so thin a shell that the birds ate it up. Well, the birds eat me up for the same reason, if I don't look out. I am social, but not gregarious. I do not thrive in clubs, I do not smoke, or tell stories, or drink, or dispute, or keep late hours. I am usually as solitary as a bird of prey, though I trust not for the same reason. I love so much to float on the current of my own thoughts, I mix better with farmers, workers, and country people generally, than with professional or business men. Birds of a feather do flock together, and if we do not feel at ease in our company we may be sure we are in the wrong flock. Once while crossing the continent, at some station in Minnesota a gray-bearded, farmerlike man got on the train and presently began to look eagerly about the Pullman as if to see what kind of company he was in. After a while his eye settled on me at the other end of the car. In a few minutes he came over to me and sat down beside me and began

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to tell me his story. He had come from Germany as a young man and had lived fifty years on a farm in Minnesota, and now he was going back to visit the country of his birth. He had prospered and had left his sons in charge of his farm. What an air he had of a boy out of school! The adventure was warming his blood; he was going home and he wanted some one to whom he could tell the good news. I was probably the only real countryman in the car and he picked me out at once; some quality of rural things hovered about us both and drew us together. I felt that he had paid me an involuntary compliment. How unsophisticated and communicative he was! So much so that I took it upon myself to caution him against the men he was liable to fall in with in New York. I should like to know if he reached the fatherland safely and returned to his Minnesota farm.

When I was a boy six or seven years old a quack phrenologist stopped at our house and father kept him overnight. In the morning he fingered the bumps of all of us to pay for his lodging and breakfast. When he came to my head I remember he grew enthusiastic. “This boy will be a rich man," he said; "his head beats 'em all," and he enlarged on the great wealth I was to accumulate. I forgot the rest, but that my bumps were nuggets of gold under the quack's fingers; this I have not forgotten.

The prophecy never came true, though more money did come my way than to any of the rest of the family. Three of my brothers, at least, were not successful from a business point of view, and while I myself have failed in every business venture I ever undertook-beginning with that first speculative stroke sometime in the 'forties, when one March morning I purchased the prospective sap of Curtis's two maple trees for four cents-yet a certain success from a bread-and-butter point of view has been mine. Father took less stock in me than in the other boys, mainly, I suppose, on account of my proclivity

for books; hence it was a deep satisfaction to me, when his other sons had failed him and loaded the old farm with debt, that I could come back and be able to take the burden of the debts upon myself and save the farm from going into strange hands. But it was my good fortune, a kind of constitutional good luck and not any business talent, that enabled me to do so. Remembering the prediction of the old quack phrenologist, I used to have my dreams when a boy, especially on one occasion, I remember, when I was tending the sap kettles in the sugar bush on a bright April day, of gaining great wealth and coming home in imposing style and astonishing the natives with my display. How different the reality from the boy's dream! I came back, indeed, with a couple of thousand dollars in my pocket (on my bank book), sorrowing and oppressed, more like a pilgrim doing penance than like a conqueror returning from his victories. But we kept the old farm, and, as you know, it still plays an important part in my life, though I passed the title to my brother many years ago. It is my only home; other homes that I have had were mere camping places for a day and night. But the wealth which my bumps indicated turned out to be a very shadowy and uncommercial kind, yet of a kind that thieves cannot steal or panics disturb.

I remember the first day I went to school, probably near my fifth year. It was at the old stone schoolhouse, about one and a half miles from home. I recall vividly the suit mother made for the occasion out of some striped cotton goods, with a pair of little flaps or hounds ears upon my shoulders that tossed about as I ran. I accompanied Olly Ann, my oldest sister. At each one of the four houses we passed on the way I asked, "Who lives there?" I have no recollection of what happened at school those first days, but I remember struggling with the alphabet soon after; the letters were arranged in a column, the vowels first, a, e, i, o, u, and then the

consonants. The teacher would call us to her chair three or four times a day and, opening the Colles spelling book, point to the letters one by one and ask me to name them, drilling them into me in that way. I remember that one of the boys, older than I, Hen Meeker, on one occasion stuck on e. "I'll bet little Johnny Burris can tell what that letter is. Come up here, Johnny." Up I went and promptly answered, to the humiliation of Hen, "E." "I told you so," said the schoolmarm. How long it took me to learn the alphabet in this arbitrary manner I do not know. But I remember tackling the a-b, abs, and slowly mastering those short columns. I remember also getting down under the desk and tickling the bare ankles of the big girls who sat in the seat in front of me.

The summer days were long and little boys must sit on the hard seats and be quiet and only go out in the regular recess. The seat I sat on was a slab turned flat side up and supported on four legs cut from a sapling. My feet did not touch the floor, and I suppose I got very tired, and one afternoon the oblivion of sleep came over me, and when I came to consciousness again I was in a neighbor's house on a couch and the "smell of camphor pervaded the room." I had fallen off the seat backward and hit my head on the protruding stones of the unplastered wall behind me, and cut a hole in it, and, I suppose, for the moment effectively scattered my childish wits. But Mrs. Reed was a motherly body and consoled me with flowers and sweets and bathed my wounds with camphor, and I suppose little Johnny was soon himself again. I have often wondered if a small bony protuberance on the back of my head dated from that collision with the old stone schoolhouse.

Another early remembrance connected with the old stone schoolhouse is seeing Hiram, during the summer noons, catch fish in a pail back of old Jonas More's grist mill and put them in the potholes in the red sandstone rocks, to

be kept there till we went home at night. Then he took them in his dinner pail and put them in his pond down in the pasture lot. I suspect that it was this way that chubs got introduced into the West Settlement trout stream. The fish used to swim around and around in the potholes, seeking a way to escape. I would put my finger into the water, but jerk it back quickly as the fish came around. I was afraid of them. But before that I was once scared into a panic by a high-soaring hen hawk. I have probably pointed out to you where, one summer day, as I was going along the road out on what we called the big hill, I looked skyward and saw a big hen hawk describing his large circles about me. A sudden fear fell upon me, and I took refuge behind the stone wall. Still earlier in my career I had my first panic farther along on this same road. I suppose I had started off on my first journey to explore the world, when, getting well down the Deacon road beside the woods, I looked back and, seeing how far I was from home, was seized with a sudden consternation and turned and ran back as fast as I could go. I have seen a young robin do the same thing when it had wandered out a yard or so on the branch away from the nest.

I mastered only my a-b-c's at the old stone schoolhouse. A year or two later we were set off in the West Settlement district and I went to school at a little unpainted schoolhouse with a creek on one side of it, and toeing squarely on the highway on the other. This also was about one and a half miles from home, an easy adventurous journey in the summer with the many allurements of field, stream, and wood, but in winter often a battle with snow and cold. In winter we went across lots, my elder brothers breaking a path through the fields and woods. How the tracks in the snow-squirrel, hare, skunk, fox-used to excite my curiosity; and the line of ledges off on the left in the woods where brother Wilson used to set traps for skunks and coons, how they haunted my

imagination as I caught dim glimpses of them trudging along in our narrow path! One mild winter morning, after I had grown to be a boy of twelve or thirteen, my younger brother and I had an adventure with a hare. He sat in his form in the deep snow between the roots of a maple tree that stood beside the path. We were almost upon him before we discovered him. As he did not move, I withdrew a few yards to a stone wall and armed myself with a bowlder like my fist. Returning, I let drive, sure of my game, but I missed by a foot, and the hare bounded away over the wall and out into the open and off for the hemlocks a quarter of a mile away. A rabbit in his form only ten feet away does not so easily become the rabbit in the hand. This desire of the farm boy to slay every wild creature he saw was universal in my time. I trust things have changed in this respect since then.

At the little old schoolhouse I had many teachers. I got well into Dayball's Arithmetic, Olney's Geography, and read in Hall's History of the United States through the latter getting quite familiar with the Indian wars and the French war and the Revolution. Some books in the district library also attracted me. I think I was the only one of the family who took books from the library. I recall especially Murphy, the Indian Killer and the Life of Washington. The latter took hold of me. I remember one summer Sunday, as I was playing through the house with my older brothers, stopping to read a certain passage of it aloud, and that it moved me so that I did not know whether I was in the body or out. Many times I read that passage, and every time I was submerged, as it were, by a wave of emotion. I mention so trifling a matter only to show how responsive I was to literature at an early age. I should perhaps offset this statement by certain other facts which are by no means flattering. There was a period in my later boyhood when comic-song books, mostly of the negro-minstrelsy sort, satisfied my crav

ing for poetic literature. I used to learn the songs by heart and invent and extemporize tunes for them. To this day I can repeat some of those rank negro songs.

My taste for books began early, but my taste for good literature was of a much later and slow growth. My interest in theological and scientific questions antedated my love of literature. During the last half of my teens I was greatly interested in phrenology and possessed a copy of Spurgheim's Phrenology, and of Combs's Constitution of Man. I also subscribed to Fowler's Phrenological Journal, and for years. accepted the phrenologists' own estimate of the value of their science. And I still see some general truths in it. The size and shape of the brain certainly give clews to the mind within, but its subdivision into many bumps, or numerous small areas, like a garden plot, from each one of which a different crop is produced, is absurd. Certain bodily functions are localized in the brain, but not our mental and emotional traits-veneration, selfesteem, sublimity; these are attributes of the mind as a unit.

As I write these lines I am trying to see wherein I differed from my brothers and from other boys of my acquaintance. I certainly had a livelier interest in things and events about me. When Mr. McClancey proposed to start an academy in the village and came there to feel the pulse of the people and to speak upon the subject, I believe I was the only boy in his audience. I was probably ten or twelve years of age. At one point in his address the speaker had occasion to use me to illustrate his point. "About the size of that boy there," he said, pointing to me, and my face flushed with embarrassment. The academy was started and I hoped in a few years to attend it. But the time when father could see his way to send me there never came. One season when I was fifteen or sixteen I set my heart on going to school at Harpersfield. A boy whom I knew in the village attended it and I wanted

to accompany him. Father talked encouragingly and held it out as a possible reward if I helped hurry the farm work along. This I did, for the first time taking to field with the team and plow and "summer fallowing" one of the oatstubble lots. I followed the plow those September days with dreams of Harpersfield Academy hovering about me, but the reality never came. Father concluded, after I had finished my job of plowing, that he could not afford it. Butter was low and he had too many other ways for his money. I think it quite possible that my dreams gave me the best there was in Harpersfield, anyway. A worthy aspiration is never lost. All these things differentiate me from my brothers.

My interest in theological questions showed itself about the same time. An itinerant lecturer, with a smooth, ready tongue, came to the village charged with novel ideas about the immortality of the soul, accepting the literal truth of the text, "The soul that sinneth, it shall die." I attended the meetings and took notes of the speaker's glib talk. I distinctly remember that it was from his mouth that I first heard the word "encyclopædia." When he cited the Encyclopædia Britannica in confirmation of some statement, I had no doubt of its truth, and I resolved some time to get my hands on that book. I still have those notes and references that I took sixty years ago.

At a much earlier stage of my mental development. I had a passion for drawing, but, quite unguided, it resulted only in a waste of paper. I wanted to walk before I could creep, to paint before I could draw, and, getting a box of cheap water colors, I indulged my crude artistic instincts. My most ambitious piece was a picture of General Winfield Scott standing beside his horse and some piece of artillery, which I copied from a print. It was, of course, an awful daub, but in connection with it I heard for the first time a new word-the word "taste" used in its æsthetic sense. One of the