The intellectual slowness of which I have spoken continued through all these years.  I had left the dame’s school, where the rule of long division proved my pons asinorum, and went to a man’s school, where I earned my schooling by making the fires and sweeping the schoolroom, and here I learned some Latin and the higher rules in arithmetic by rote, always with the reputation of a stupid boy, good in the snowball fights of the intermission, when we had two snow forts to capture and defend; in running foot-races, the speediest, and in backhand wrestling, the strongest, but mentally hopeless.  All this period of my life seems dreary and void, except when I got to nature, and the delight of my hours in the fields and woods is all that remains to me of a childhood tormented by burdens of conscience laid on me prematurely, and by a domestic discipline the severity of which, with all the reverence and gratitude I bear my parents, I can hardly consider otherwise than gravely mistaken and disastrous to me, though my mother’s discipline has never made me an enemy of the rod for children.  My own experience as child and parent convinces me that an inexorable, though mild, physical punishment is the only remedy for the obstinacy of certain fractious child natures, in the years before reason operates, and for the assurance of necessary discipline in families.

The incessant Bible lessons, filling my mind with indigestible conceptions of life present and to come, mysteries for the contemplation of a philosopher, not for a boy of ten; the recognition of my total depravity, as manifested in the trivial transgressions of a thoughtless child, to whom life had hardly yet offered a duty to fulfill or transgress; the terrible gloom of this Puritan horizon, on which no light showed me promise of better things, only to be hoped for through a process of repentance and atonement for the sins of Adam, the fitness and method of which process were far beyond my capacity to comprehend, as beyond that of any child,—­all these things made my intellectual life so sombre that I can but regard the long interval of intellectual apathy as a fortunate provision against some form of mental malady consequent on the morbid development of my early childhood.

Our winters were long and hard, and I remember the snow falling on Thanksgiving Day (the last Thursday in November) and not thawing again until the beginning of March, and that, in the house where I was born, we had the fall of snow so heavy that we could tunnel the path to the barn, the drift covering the door of the house.  The coming of spring was my constant preoccupation through the winter, and my joy was intense at the first swelling of the buds, the coming color in the willow twigs, which ushered in the changes of spring; then the catkins, the willow leaves, and the long rains which carried off the snow, all welcome as daylight after a weary night, because they restored me to the forests and the wildflowers, the fields and the streams; and for miles around I knew every sunny spot where came the first anemones, hepaticas, and, above all, the trailing arbutus, joy of my childhood, the little white violets, their yellow sisters, then the “dog-tooth violet,” and a long list of flowers whose names I have forgotten long ago.