Page:An Epistle to Posterity.djvu/24

AN EPISTLE TO POSTERITY

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CHAPTER I

Early Days in New Hampshire — My Father and Mother — Mr. Emerson's School at Boston — Daniel Webster at Marshfield — Visit to Washington — "Tyler Too" — Charles Dickens — Along the Ohio and Down the Mississippi — The Carved Oxen at Nauvoo — Joseph Smith and the Mormons

My recollections of childhood are very vivid, especially of my father, a tall and most picturesque man, with blue eyes and fine curling black hair, with a great laughing mouth full of white teeth and of eloquent voice, and a laugh which filled the whole county of Cheshire; a man who liked to dance and to march, who never heard music but to keep step to it; a man, in fact, who had the veriest charm for children — a tremendous vitality.

In those days my father, still a boy himself, and a very boyish boy, was the best hand of us all at snowballing in the winter, teaching us to slide and to skate, and reading aloud to us in the evening the immortal stories of Walter Scott, with a mingled joy and pathos which the author himself would have enjoyed; a kind and loving and generous man, full of genius and eccentricity, who dressed in furs and moccasins in January, when he would go up to the White Mountains to hunt