The remaining two months of the broken term of the college course and the better part of the vacation were spent in my father’s workshop, where the work was rather pressing and the shop short-handed.  My father’s business was mainly the manufacture of certain mechanical implements for which he and his brother held the patents, and in the spring and autumn he was accustomed to carry the consignments of them to his customers in New York.  His workshop was resorted to by several ingenious fellow New Englanders who had inventions to work out, and in the execution of these I was found useful.  Among these was one Daniel Ball, whose specialty was locks, of which he invented, patented, and sold the patents of a new one every year, all worked out in my father’s shop.  Ball was a man of remarkable mechanical ingenuity and extraordinary profanity—­of a savage temper, and very exclusive in his human sympathies; but he had a profound reverence for my father, of whom he used to say that “Old Joe Stillman was the only honest man God ever made,” and I am inclined to think, looking back on a long life and wide experience in men of all classes and many nations, that Ball was justified in the esteem he held my father in, though admissibly wrong in his exclusiveness,—­for I cannot recall, in all my memories of the old man, a single instance of his hesitating over the most trivial transaction in which a question of honesty was involved, and I have known him to relinquish his clear rights rather than to provoke a disagreement with a neighbor.  He had a profound aversion to any ostentation of religious fervor, as had my mother.  If he had lived to-day he would certainly have been an advanced evolutionist; even then his liberality in matters of doctrine and his unbounded charity towards all differences of opinion in religious questions used to cause my mother great anxiety as to his orthodoxy.  He thought the fields and woods better places to pass the Sabbath in than a meeting-house, and this was a subject of great pain to her, the more that he developed the same feeling in me; but he never deferred in these matters to anybody, and never held a shade of that reverence for the clergy which was almost a passion in my mother’s nature.  While of an extreme tenderness of heart to all suffering or hardship outside the family, even towards animals, his domestic discipline was brutal and narrow.  In the latter respect he was a survival of the old New England system; in the former, himself.

I had a parrot given me by one of my brothers returning from the Southern States, and the bird took an extravagant fondness for my father rather than for me.  He was allowed to go free about the house and garden, and would go and sit on the fence when my father should be coming back from the workshop to dinner and supper, and run to meet his footstep long before he was in sight, chuckling and chattering with delight.  Early one morning the parrot got shut, by chance, in the cupboard, and, attempting to gnaw his way out,