In spite of my aversion I was sent back to New York the next autumn for another winter’s schooling.  I landed from the steamer at the foot of Cortlandt Street two or three days after a great fire in New York, and I saw the ruins still smoking and the firemen playing on them.  My baggage—­a biscuit box, with my scanty wardrobe and a bag of hickory-nuts for my city cousins—­I carried on my shoulders and walked the length of the city, my brother living in what was then farther New York, in Seventh Street, near the East River.  At that time Fourteenth Street was the extreme limit of the city’s growth, except for a few scattering residences.  Beyond, and, on the East River side, even most of what lay beyond Seventh Street, was unreclaimed land.  I sailed my toy boats on the salt marshes where Tompkins Square now is, and I used to shoot, botanize, and hunt for crystals all over the island beyond Thirty-Second Street, the land being sparsely inhabited.  I discovered a little wild cactus growing freely amongst the rocks, and carried a handkerchief full of it home, getting myself well pricked by the spines, but to my botanical enthusiasm this was nothing in view of the discovery.  Only here and there patches of arable land maintained small farmhouses, but the greater part of the surface of Manhattan Island was composed of a poor grazing land, interspersed with rolling ledges of bare granite, on which were visible what were then known as “diluvial scratches,” which my brother Charles, who was an ardent naturalist, explained to me as the grooves made by the irruption of the deluge, which carried masses of stone across the broad ledges and left these scratches, then held widely as testimony to the actuality of the great deluge of Genesis.  I think that we had to wait for Agassiz to show us that the “diluvial scratches” were really glacial abrasions, caused by the great glacier which came down the valley of the Hudson and went to sea off Sandy Hook.  At this time my brother was making conchology his special study, and many holidays we spent on the harbor, dredging for shells, and great was our joy when he discovered a new species, which was named after him by the Lyceum of Natural History of New York.

The following year my fifth brother, Jacob, on leaving college, took charge of a school in the centre of New York State, built by the Sabbatarian community at large, in De Ruyter, a village of which many of the inhabitants were Sabbatarians, and it was decided that I should go there to follow my studies in preparation for college.  I was to “board out” a debt which an uncle owed to my eldest brother, and which was uncollectible in any other way, and there I made my first acquaintance with semi-independent life, exchanging a home for a dormitory and a boarding-house.  My uncle was to supply also my bedding, the academy being provided with bedsteads; but he was a heedless man, and I remember that I had to sleep six weeks on the bed-cords, with my wearing apparel as my only