Her ardent desire that her children should have a liberal education came to a climax on me, the last, born at the end of the period of child-bearing.  She taught me my letters before I could articulate them, when I was two I could read, and at three I was put on a high stool to read the Bible for visitors, so that I cannot remember when I could not read, and when not more than five or six I used to be at the head of the spelling classes and spelling matches, in which all the boys and girls were divided into equal companies, and the school-teacher gave out the hardest words in the spelling-book to each side in turn, all who failed to spell their word sitting down, until the solitary survivor on one side or the other decided the victory, and even before I was seven I was generally that survivor.  I read insatiably all the good story-books they would let me have, and I cannot recall the time at which there was anything even in the Bible new to me.  With an incipient passion for nature and animal life, I read with delight all the books of natural history I could get, and I have heard in later years that in all the community of Sabbatarianism I was known as a prodigy.  Fortunately I was saved from a probable idiocy in my later life by a severe attack of typhoid fever at seven, out of which attack I came a model of stupidity, and so remained until I was fourteen, my thinking powers being so completely suspended that at the dame’s school to which I was sent I was repeatedly flogged for not comprehending the simplest things.  I got through simple arithmetic as far as “Long Division,” and there had to turn back to the beginning three times before I could be made to understand the principle of division by more than one figure.

In the humiliation of this period of my life, in which I came to consider myself as little better than a fool, my only consolation was the large liberty I enjoyed in the woods and fields with my father on Saturdays, or with my brothers Charles and Jacob on their long botanizing excursions, or in the moments of leisure when I was not wanted to turn the grindstone or blow the bellows in the workshop.  Those long walks, in which I was indefatigable, and the days or nights when I went fishing with my brother Jacob, who was ten years older than myself, and who inherited the wandering and adventurous longings of my father, are the only things I can remember of this period which gave me any pleasure.  I can see vividly the banks of the Mohawk, where we used to fish for perch, bream, and pike-perch; recall where, with my brother Charles, we found the rarer flowers of the valley, the cypripediums, the most rare wild-ginger, only to be found in one locality, the walking fern, equally rare, and the long walks in the pine forests, whose murmuring branches in the west wind fascinated me more than any other thing in nature.