The perennial delight of this return of springtime was the great feature of my life, and then began the excursions into the forests around us, and the succession of sights and sounds, the order of the unfolding of the leaves, from the willow to the oak, the singing of the frogs in the marshes, and the birds in the copses and fields (for in the great woods there are few singing birds).  I knew them all, and when and where to hear them.  The bluebird, or blue robin, as it was called in our neighborhood, was the first, and he assured us that spring had really come with a plaintive song, the sweetest to memory of all nature’s voices; then the American robin (the migratory thrush), a bold, cheery note, full of summer life; and after those the chief was the bobolink, singing up into the sky like the skylark, and with which we connected the ripening of the strawberry, the merriest and most rollicking of all bird songs, as that of the bluebird was the tenderest.  Then came the hermit thrush, heard only in the depth of the forest, shy and remote in his life and nesting, and the whip-poor-will, in the evening.  Each was a new leaf turned over in my book of life, the reading of which was my only happiness.  What else, or more, could be expected of an existence hedged in by the terrors of eternity, the hauntings of an inevitable condemnation, unless I could obtain some mysterious renovation, only attainable through an act of divine grace which no human merit could entitle me to, and which I tried in vain to win the benediction of?  And how dreary seemed the heaven I was set to win—­no birds, no flowers, no fields or forests, only the eternal continuation of the hymn-singing and protracted meetings, in which, in our system, consisted the glorification of God, which was the end and aim of our existences!  I wonder how many religious parents remember the misery of child life under such influences.

The struggles of conscience through which I went in those days can be imagined by no one, and I can hardly realize them myself, except by recalling little incidents which show what the pressure must have been.  I have mentioned an escapade of this period, connected with the last flogging my father gave me, but of which that was only the secondary cause, determining the moment but not the movement.  It was a matter of conscience at bottom.  My mother had, when I was about six years old, taken a little octoroon girl of three, the illegitimate daughter of a quadroon in our neighborhood, with the intention of bringing her up as a servant.  The child was quick-witted and irrepressible, and disputes began between us as soon as she felt at home.  I suppose she must have been inclined to impertinence, for she had to be whipped, and as at her age no difference of condition was evident to her, she became a severe trial to my equanimity.  Every outbreak of temper induced by her conduct toward me became occasion of a period of penitence, for I was taught that such outbreaks were sinful, and as neither had I the amount of self-control that I needed to overlook the provocations she gave, nor had she the power of understanding the position, the transgressions that my conscience had to bear up under became an intolerable load.