The romance of youth is the sugar of life, and its sweets to memory, as life recedes, augment as “distance lends enchantment to the view.”  We make no account of the evanescent troubles which come to us then but for a moment, and are immediately chased away with the thickening delights that gild young life and embalm it for the memories of age.  The gravity of years delights to recount these; and few are indisposed to listen, for it is a sort of heart-history of every one, and in hearing or reading, memory awakes, and youth and its joys are back again, even to tottering, palsied age.  Then, gentle reader, do not sneer at me:  these are all I have left; my household gods are torn away, my boys sleep in bloody graves, my home is desolate, I am alone, with only one to comfort me—­she who shares the smiles and tears which lighten and soothe the weary days of ebbing life.

CHAPTER XIII.

INFLUENCE OF CHILDHOOD.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS—­FORTUNE—­MIRABEAU B. LAMAR—­DR. ALONZO CHURCH—­JULIUS CAESAR—­L.Q.C.  LAMAR—­TEXAN INDEPENDENCE—­COLQUITT—­LUMPKIN—­WHAT A GREAT MAN CAN DO IN ONE DAY—­CHARLES J. JENKINS.

The memories of childhood cling, perhaps, more tenaciously than those of any after period of life.  The attachments and antipathies then formed are more enduring.  Our school-companions at our first school—­the children of our immediate neighborhood, who first rolled with us upon the grass, and dabbled with us in the branch—­we never forget.  Time, absence, protracted separation, all fail to obliterate the features, the dispositions, or anything about them, which so unconsciously fastens upon the mind, and grows into the tender soul of childhood.  These memories retain and bring back with them the feelings, the likes and dislikes, which grew with them.  These feelings are the basis of lifetime loves, and eternal antipathies.

The boy is father to the man, as the girl is mother to the woman.  Who that has lived seventy years will not attest this from his own life’s experience?  The generous, truthful boy will be the noble, honorable man; the modest, timid, truthful girl will be the gentle, kind, and upright woman.  Nature plants the germ, and education but cultivates the tree.  It never changes the fruit.  The boy who, when dinner-time comes, happens to have a pie, when his fellows have none, and will open his basket before his companions, and divide with them, will carry the same trait to the grave.  His hand will open to assist the needy, and he will seek no reward beyond the consciousness of having done right.  And he who, with the same school-boy’s treasure, will steal away, and devour it behind the school-house, and alone, will, through life, be equally mean in all his transactions.  From motives of interest, he may assume a generosity of conduct, but the innate selfishness of his heart will, in the manner of his dispensing favors, betray itself.  Education, and the influences of polished