covering, before he awoke to the fact that I had a prepaid claim on him for mattress and bedding.  But we were on the edge of a great forest, and in the almost primeval woodland I found compensation for many discomforts, and what time my tasks spared me was spent wandering there.  The persistent apathy which had oppressed me for so many years still refused to lift, and my stupidity in learning was such that my brother threatened to send me home as a disgrace to the family.  I had taken up Latin again, algebra, and geometry, and, though I was up by candlelight in the morning, and rarely put my books away till after ten at night except for meals, it was impossible for me to construe half of the lesson in Virgil, and the geometry was learned by rote.  I at length gave up exercise to gain time for study, and my despairing struggles were misery.  I was then fourteen, and in the seventh year of this darkness, and it seemed to me hopeless.

What happened I know not, but about the middle of the first term the mental fog broke away suddenly, and before the term ended I could construe the Latin in less time than it took to recite it, and the demonstrations of Euclid were as plain and clear as a fairy story.  My memory came back so completely that I could recite long poems after a single reading, and no member of the class passed a more brilliant examination at the end of the term than I. At the end of the second term I could recite the whole of Legendre’s geometry, plane and spherical, from beginning to end, without a question, and the class examination was recorded as the most remarkable which the academy had witnessed for many years.  I have never been able to conceive an explanation of this curious phenomenon, which I record only as of possible interest to some one interested in psychology.  Unfortunately, the academy failed to meet the expenses, and at the end of my second term the students dispersed to their homes, I going with great regret, for I enjoyed intensely this life on the edge of a large natural forest, through which ran a trout brook, and in which such wild woodland creatures as still survived our civilization were tolerably abundant.  Amongst my fellow-students at De Ruyter was Charles Dudley Warner, with whom I contracted a friendship which survives in activity, though our paths in life have been since widely separated.  I recall him as a sensitive, poetical boy,—­almost girlish in his delicacy of temperament,—­and showing the fine esprit which has made him one of the first of our humorists.  His “Being a Boy” is a delightful and faithful record of the existence of a genuine New England boy, which will remain to future generations as a paleontological record when the race of them is extinct, if indeed it be not so already.