What to do with myself during the long summer vacation was the next question. My money was fast wasting in spite of my economies. There were no country schools open to male teachers in summer. My sister advised me to find employment on a farm. I thought at once of Bellingham, and my dear Uncle Lyman. He did not want help and eventually I hired myself to another uncle who lived in the extreme southern part of the town, close upon the boundary of Rhode Island. My wages were to be twelve dollars per month with board. My uncle's wife was my father's only surviving sister. Their children were married and settled elsewhere. All that was left to them was a large farm and old age. The one made them rather poorer than richer; the other brought upon them a growing habit of penuriousness, gloom and irritability. I was expected to do all the heavy work and most of the chores, except the milking; that, they would allow no one to do, for fear of not squeezing out the last drop. My aunt still made butter and cheese to sell, and in this work I usually helped her the first thing in the morning before the regular day's work. We had breakfast at sunrise, often before. After breakfast my uncle went into the sitting-room where:

I suppose that is what he did, for I could hear the low mumble of his voice and occasionally catch a scriptural phrase, but neither my aunt nor myself participated in this mockery of family prayers. She said she had too much to do, and she could not spare me from the cheese tub and the churn. She scolded her husband for his contributions to the church, and begrudged every cent that was spent. She had Franklin's prudential maxims at her tongue's end, besides many another gathered in the course of her long life of thrift and hard work. She never rested from her labors until the Sabbath. Our food was of the coarsest kind, but well cooked, and work and hunger were sauce enough. She baked once a week in a great brick oven; her other daily cooking was done by an open fire. Brown bread and cheese were the staff of our life, and I became more fond of them than of any viands I have since eaten. In vain have I besought my household to discover the recipe of my aunt's brown loaves. Who can recover for me the relish that went with them? With this aged couple I led a lonely yet healthful life. I came nearer to the earth than ever before; I mean her dirt, her stones, her odors and dews as well as to cows, sheep and horses, whose closer relation to the soil insensibly affects those who have the care of them. I felt myself a brother to the ox that I yoked and guided along the furrow. My nigh ox came from the pasture at my call and would lick my hand and stretch out his neck to be stroked. The whole barnyard was friendly, and I took pleasure, having none other, in the signs of it. The neighbors were few and I saw nothing of them. One young man sometimes called, but as his interest in me appeared to consist in a desire to save my soul his visits distressed me. It was my singular fortune through my childhood and early youth, to have been followed by soul savers. At last in desperation I told him that I was not sure as yet that I had a soul to save; when I had, I would consider his propositions. Whereupon he went his way and reported that I was a Universalist, that being in Bellingham the most opprobrious of names, in consequence of an ancient feud between the Baptist and Universalist churches. The Baptists had come off conquerers; the name, however, remained; and an indefinable name of reproach is a convenient thing to have in a country neighborhood.

I have mentioned the penuriousness of my employers. In the case of my uncle it was exhibited in the most extraordinary, amusing, yet harmless ways. He never could pass by an old, bent, used-up nail, bit of string, pin or a straight stick without picking it up and putting it away. The collar of his coat and front of his gaudy flannel vest were stuck full of pointless pins and eyeless needles. The shed opposite the house was a museum of rubbish, odds and ends of the most worthless articles neatly sorted, tied up in small bundles and hung about the sides of the building. It was a well-developed mania with him, having acquired it through his long years of money getting and saving, and in larger matters, which had made him a well-to-do farmer. Although now old, he was a well-preserved man; there was still a wholesome red spot in his cheek, and a gleam of youth in his eye. His movements were so deliberate and slow that it was impossible that he could ever have worn himself out with work. He would pause between every hill that he hoed and make some remark, or look up at the sun for the time of the day. He could not mow a straight swath because he was always nicking in and out for some straw left by other mowers. When he harnessed his aged horse, as reliable as an ox to drive, and not much faster, he would go over and over every buckle and strap to make sure that all was safe, in the meantime talking to him in a soothing voice as if he expected every moment that he would run away. If Jim had a strong point it was in standing still. When he sneezed he used to say, "I guess I am good for another day," and like his wife he had a ready proverb for everything. Seldom could I catch the whole of it, for he sputtered in his speech and had a falsetto voice. It was evident that he had acquired his property by exceeding thrift, rather than labor, by that ancient all-pervading custom of the New England farmer of doing without and making things last another year.

I had promised myself to do some studying during the summer, but found that the long hours of labor and fatigue at their end unfitted me for anything save rest and sleep. I scarcely opened a book of any kind. I had a volume of Macauly's Essays with me in which I read a little on the Sabbath. On rainy days I stole away to the hay mow and read one of Jane Porter's novels which I found in the house. I attempted to commit to memory the whole of the Lady of the Lake, but got no farther than the first canto, and the songs interspersed through the others. These songs I recited in the field, and they were a great comfort to me. Little do the poets know in what strange, obscure places, and in what lonely, unknown hearts their verses find lodgment. It is not necessary that one should contend that Scott is the greatest of poets, who thought so for a single summer.

With thirty dollars in my purse and a blue camlet suit made of a cloak, which had been my father's best outer garment, I returned to Worcester Academy. I made a resolution, which I kept, to have no more intimacies with the Oreads, and to devote myself to study. I still cherished the idea of college, although it seemed as distant as ever. I began to be interested in public affairs and attended the first convention of the Free Soil party which was held in Worcester. I heard Charles Sumner and Charles Allen speak. Sumner appealed to my sympathies, Allen to my reason. Allen argued, Sumner was eloquent. Most young men in New England had hitherto been admirers of Webster and Clay, and termed themselves Whigs. The truth was they were called to whatever was eloquence. They worshipped the greatness of sounding, patriotic periods. How we admired Kossuth, and immediately paid him the shallow compliment of wearing a Kossuth hat. I also thought I was a Whig, much to the sorrow of my mother, whose sympathies were with the Abolitionists. After the Free Soil convention I was a Free Soiler, and such I continued, casting my first vote for John C. Fremont. At this time Worcester was the favorite place for every kind of convention of the friends of progress. Anti-slavery, Non-resistance and Women's Rights. I heard all the strange and strong speakers and advocates on those free and lively platforms. I heard Garrison, Phillips, May, Quincy, Pillsbury, the Fosters, Sojourner Truth, Burleigh, Lucretia Mott, and Ernestine Rose. The last speaker, a handsome, modishly dressed New York Jewess, converted me to the cause of woman. In a short time I was an enthusiastic reformer all along the line. Probably there has been no period in our history so charged with new and revolutionary ideas as that from 1835 to 1850. It was a good time to be alive and to be near the center of agitation in Massachusetts. I heard both church and state and the whole structure of society attacked. Whatever other reform might be under discussion these were sure to receive the hardest blows; strike, and spare not, was the watchword. For me the great event in my personal experience and awakening at this period, was not especially connected with the reforms that I have named. One small book very much in common with my former limited reading and enthusiasms for celebrated men, shook me to the center of my being. It was Emerson's Representative Men, recently published. Carelessly looking over the volumes on Mr. Grout's counter in Worcester, I took it up, attracted by its title, for I was always hungering for stories of eminent men, always hoping to find the secret of their greatness, that I might use it for my own advancement. I stood and read a few pages, laid down the book, but felt that I must read it through. After some battling between my purse and desire, desire won, and I bought the precious volume at the cost of my breakfast for several weeks, so slender were my resources. In the course of three or four years I added to my library Milton's poems, a volume of Tennyson and three of Potter's translation of Euripides; the latter, not because I wanted it, but because I happened to have made the final bid at a book auction. In Representative Men I found the meat my nature craved. In all previous histories and biographies that I had read, there was much going round and about poets and heroes, an external, academic treatment; with Emerson I seemed to come nearer the possible ideal which was already vaguely outlined in my mind. Besides there was much else than Napoleon and Shakespeare in the pages. There were the moral and poetic insights, and, moreover, there was the style, the vital and penetrating Emersonianism, which aroused, and no doubt, dazzled the youthful and impressionable reader. Emerson's terse epigrammatic method of writing was congenial to my inability to follow difficult logic. His style seemed to me the poetical foil of all the prosers of all time. Through the reading of this book eventually I became acquainted with Emerson, Alcott and Thoreau. They became my teachers; I followed them until, by their guidance, I was enlarged enough to find my own way into companionship with those poets and thinkers, who have endured through the ages. May I never forget to acknowledge my debt to those men of Concord, my earliest masters in fidelity to ideals and the inward light.