Thus often in this cruel world do the innocent suffer, while the guilty go unscathed to torture a confiding public with what the great apostle calls the “foolishness of preaching.”

This summer brought our family few smiles but many tears, and the death-angel passed close to our doors.  My eldest brother, while at work in the hayfield, was smitten by the sun, causing a mental aberration which made him a wanderer upon the face of the earth, and finally led him to cut the thread of life with his own hand; my second brother was pulled by his coat entangled in a wheel, beneath a heavy load which crushed his thigh.  This left the rest of us to struggle as best we could with multitudinous weeds striving to choke the crops, and the many trials incidental to wresting sustenance from the reluctant bosom of mother earth.

My brother Mark, about this time took upon himself the joys and sorrows of a family and home of his own, while I assumed the care of a family of forty school children in the neighboring town of I——.

I was but “unsweetened sixteen,” and lack of tact and strength brought me many trials in my endeavors to “teach the young ideas how to shoot correctly.”  The usual tacks were placed in my chair, causing the war-dances incidental to such occasions; the customary pranks were resorted to by young America to settle the oft mooted question as to who is master; the inevitable interference of parents followed, who as usual, regarded their children as cherubs whose wings they seemed to think would soon appear were it not for the tyrannical spanks of the unworthy teacher.

I survived the fiery ordeal after a fashion, and that winter entered a college in the state of Maine.  The same old unrest came to me there, wearied with the dry-as-dust lectures by the faculty of superannuated ministers, but I graduated after a two weeks’ course, and vainly endeavored for three weeks to catch the divine afflatus at the Theological Institution, which was supposed to be necessary to enable me to rescue the perishing as a preacher of the gospel.  Then at the suggestion of the president, who quickly discovered my mental deficiencies, I was matriculated as a student at another university founded by the brethren of the same “Hard-shell Persuasion.”  I was but a dreamer, in the middle of my teens, dazed by conflicting opinions, but anxious to walk “quo dews vocat.”

  “Here I stood with reluctant feet,
  Where the brook and the river meet,
  Manhood and childhood sweet.

  “I saw shadows sailing by,
  As the dove, with startled eye,
  Sees the falcon downward fly.

  “To me, a child of many prayers,
  Life had quicksands, and many snares,
  Foes, and tempters came unawares.

  “Oh, let me bear through wrong and ruth,
  In my heart the dew of youth,
  On my lips the smile of truth.”

With this prayer of the poet upon our lips, many of us entered these “classic halls,” hoping to find there in communion with the good and great of the past and the present, that mental and spiritual “manna” from heaven which would inspire us to lead ourselves and others to the sublime heights of heroic endeavor.