had not the courage to meet the flogging, or the firmness to resist temptation and the persuasion of my young companions who rejoiced in a domestic freedom of which I knew nothing.  My father’s severity finally brought emancipation by its excess.  He used to follow me to see if I obeyed his orders, and one day when I had been persuaded by some boys of our neighborhood to go and bathe in the forbidden hours, he found me in the pond, led me home, and, cutting two tough peartree switches about the thickness, at the butt, of his forefinger, he took me down into the cellar, and making me strip off my jacket, broke them up to the stumps over my back, protected only by a cotton shirt.  This was the deciding event which determined me to run away from home, which I did the next week, and though my escapade did not last beyond ten days, on my return the rod was buried.

CHAPTER II

NATURE WORSHIP—­EARLY RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCES

Looking back at my mother, after a lapse of nearly forty years since I saw her last, I am surprised at the largeness of character developed in the narrow and illiberal mould of the exclusive Puritanism of the church of her inheritance, her freedom from bigotry, and the breadth of her knowledge of human nature, as well as at the justice of her instincts of religious essentials, which always kept her cheerful and hopeful in spite of the gloomy doctrine imposed on her by her education and surroundings.  Believing firmly in the eternity of hell-fire, with the logical and terrible day of judgment casting its gloomy shadow over her life, she maintained an unbounded charity for all humanity except herself, admitting the extenuation of ignorance for all others, keeping for herself even to the tithes of mint and cummin, but condoning, in her judgment of those who differed from her, the offenses which for herself she would have thought mortal sins.  In her own household all latitude in religious observance was resisted with all her strength.

In my paternal grandfather’s house the Seventh Day was a day of feasting, and after the church services all the connection went to the ancestral home to eat the most sumptuous dinner of the week.  Against this infraction of the law which forbade on the Sabbath all work not of mercy or necessity, my mother set her face, and when this was done there was no long resistance possible and my father had to give way, so that on that day we had a cold dinner, cooked on Friday.  At sunset on Friday, all work and all secular reading or amusements ceased, and only a Sabbath day’s journey was permitted so far as she could control.  But my father was a rover from his youth, and Saturday being his only leisure day he used to take me with him on long walks in the woods and fields, according to the season; and the weather and the length of the day were his only limitations.  In the house she ruled, but out of it he made his own conscience,