He
was about four years of age. He remembers learning his "A-b ab's,"
as they were called, and just how the column of letters looked in
the old spelling-book; remembers sitting on the floor under the
desks and being called out once in a while to say his letters:
"Hen Meeker, a boy bigger than I was, stuck on /e/. I can remember
the teacher saying to him; 'And you can't tell that? Why, little
Johnny Burroughs can tell you what it is. Come, Johnny.' And I
crawled out and went up and said it was e, like a little man."
Up the hill a short distance from the old homestead he indicated
the "turn 'n the road," as it passes by the "Deacon Woods"; this,
he said, was his first journey into the world. He was about four
years old when, running away, he got as far as this turn; then,
looking back and seeing how far he was from the house, he became
frightened and ran back crying. "I have seen a young robin," he
added, "do the very same thing on its first journey from the nest."
"One of my earliest recollections," he said, "is that of lying on
the hearth one evening to catch crickets that Mother said ate holes
in our stockings--big, light-colored, long-legged house crickets,
with long horns; one would jump a long way.
"Another early recollection comes to me: one summer day, when I
was three or four years old, on looking skyward, I saw a great hawk
sailing round in big circles.
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