a free education, the younger boys should be permitted to profit by the offer, and when duty entered her head there was no force capable of driving it out.  Charles, the first of us to graduate, became the college bell-ringer, to pay his fees, but Jacob and myself were in turn excused, even from this service.  My father’s practical opposition, the refusal to pay the incidental expenses for what he always persisted in regarding as a useless education, was met, in Charles’s case, by my mother’s taking in the students’ washing, to provide them.  In the cases of Jacob and myself, this drudgery was exchanged for that of a students’ boarding-house.

In all the housework involved in this complication of her duties, she never had a servant until shortly before my birth, when she took into the house a liberated African slave, the only other assistance in the house, in my childhood, being a sister six years older than myself and the daughter of one of our neighbors, who came as a “help” at the time of my birth, and subsequently married my second brother.  My mother was also the family doctor, for, except in very grave cases, we never had any other physician.  She pulled our teeth and prescribed all our medicines.  I was well grown before I wore a suit which was not of her cutting and making, though sometimes she was obliged to have in a sewing-woman for the light work.  She made all the bread we ate, cured the hams, and made great batches of sausages and mincemeat for pies, sufficient for the winter’s consumption, as well as huge pig’s-head cheeses.  How she accomplished all she did I never understood.

But with all her passionate desire to see one of her boys in what she considered the service of God, there was never, on my mother’s part, the least pressure in that direction, no suggestion that the sacrifices she was making demanded any measure of deviation from our views as to the future.  It was her hope that one of us would feel as she did, but she cheerfully resigned the hope, as son after son turned the other way.  A boy who was born three years before me, and whose death occurred before my birth, was, perhaps, in her mind, the fulfillment of her dedication, for he was, according to the accounts of friends of the family, a child of extraordinary intelligence, and she felt that God had taken him from her.  In one of those moments of confidence, in the years when I had become a counselor to her, I remember her telling me of this boy (known in the family as “little William,” to distinguish him from me), and the sufferings she endured through her doubts, lest he should have lived long enough to sin, and had not repented, for, though her dreary creed taught that the rigors of eternal damnation rested on every one who had not repented of each individual sin, and that adult baptism was the only assurance of redemption, it did not teach, nor did she believe, that the innocence of childhood required the certificate of the church.