Although I had been as “prone to mischief” as the sparks to fly upward—­ringing the academy bell at midnight by means of a string tied to the tongue, bringing the professor in his night shirt from his bed to chase me, covering his chimney with a board till he was well-nigh suffocated with smoke, hitching his horse to a boat in Mill River, pillaging his coop and scattering his hens to the four winds of heaven, crawling under his bed at night and nearly frightening him to death with unearthly groans, catching him by the legs as he jumped out and leaving him kicking on the floor as I leaped through the window amid applauding students—­I was appointed assistant teacher at the beginning of my senior year.

Then at once great dignity was assumed by me which, being resented by my former cronies, I secured order by licking them at recess one by one, though I suffered from many “nasal hemorrhages” while engaged in fistic rough and tumbles to assert my authority; I conquered, but secured many black eyes and bedewed the campus with much “claret” for the good of the order.

At length we were declared sufficiently crammed to enter college, and on graduation day I discoursed in stentorian tones upon “True Heroism,” amid the applause of the fair sex, and convulsed the audience with laughter by prancing, in my enthusiastic eloquence, upon the sore toe of one of the reverend trustees on the stage who fairly yelled with pain:  “Sic transit gloria mundi.”

Among the sins of my youth, which I confess with “shame and confusion of face” were the pranks played by me and some fellow-sinners upon our nearest neighbors.  These worthies consisted of an old man and what appeared to be his much older daughter, the two most unaccountable cranks that dame nature ever presented to my notice.

The father was possessed of the insane hallucination that he was the greatest poet that ever lived.  Often I have seen him drop his hoe in the potato field, and run for the house so that you could hardly see his heels for dust, looking for all the world like an animated pair of tongs.  As he expressed it, “an idee had struck him,” and all mankind would die of intellectual starvation unless he at once embodied said “idee” in a poem.

His greatest delight was to gather about him of an evening a crowd of young folks and read to us his preposterous “lines.”  On such occasions, some of us would quietly steal away up into his garret, and roll down over the stairs, with a thunderous uproar, a huge gilded ball which had decorated a post outside a tavern where he formerly dispensed much “fire water,” to the impoverishment of his customers and to the enrichment of himself.

Then our host, with much profanity, would rush to the rescue armed with an ancient bayonet and a fish trumpet which, like the bugle-horn of Roderic Dhu, summoned all the neighbors to his assistance; but some sympathizing friend would always upset the table holding the candle so that they could never decide who were the guilty absentees.