And Alexander?  He was an excitable and ingenious imp, who saved himself from many a spanking by his sparkling mind and entrancing sweetness of temper.  He might fly at his little slaves and beat them, and to his white playmates he never yielded a point; but they loved him, for he was generous and honest, and the happiest little mortal on the Island.  He could get into as towering a rage as old John Fawcett, but he was immediately amenable to the tenderness of his parents.

When he was four years old he was sent to a small school, which happened to be kept by a Jewess.  In spite of his precocity his parents had no wish to force a mind which, although delightful to them in its saucy quickness, aroused no ambitious hopes; they sent him to school merely that there might be less opportunity to spoil him at home.  His new experience was of a brief duration.

Hamilton on a Sunday was reading to Rachael in the library.  Alexander shoved a chair to the table and climbed with some difficulty, for he was very small, to an elevated position among the last reviews of Europe.  He demanded the attention of his parents, and, clasping his hands behind his back, began to recite rapidly in an unknown tongue.  The day was very hot, and he wore nothing but a white apron.  His little pink feet were bare on the mahogany, and his fair curls fell over a flushed and earnest face, which at all times was too thin and alert to be angelic or cherubic.  Hamilton and Rachael, wondering whom he fancied himself imitating, preserved for a moment a respectful silence, then, overcome by his solemn countenance and the fluency of his outlandish utterance, burst into one of those peals of sudden laughter which seem to strike the most sensitive chord in young children.  Alexander shrieked in wrath and terror, and made as if to fling himself on his mother’s bosom, then planted his feet with an air of stubborn defiance, and went on with his recital.  Hamilton listened a moment longer, then left the house abruptly.  He returned in wrath.

“That woman has taught him the Decalogue in Hebrew!” he exclaimed. “’Tis a wonder his brains are not addled.  He will sail boats in the swimming-bath and make shell houses in the garden for the next three years.  We’ll have no more of school.”

II

Alexander Hamilton had several escapes from imminent peril when he was a boy, and the first occurred in the month of December, 1761.  Hamilton had gone to St. Croix on business, and Rachael and the child spent the fortnight of his absence with Christiana Huggins.  Rachael was accustomed to Hamilton’s absences, but Nevis was in a very unhealthy condition, through lack of wind and rains during the preceding autumn.  The sea had looked like a metal floor for months, the Island was parched and dry, the swamps on the lowlands were pestiferous.  Many negroes had died in Charles Town, and many more were ill.  The obeah doctors, with their absurd concoctions and practices, were openly defying the physicians of repute, for the terrified blacks believed that the English had prayed once too often that the hurricane should be stayed, and that he sulked where none might feel his faintest breath.  Therefore they cursed the white doctor as futile, and flung his physic from the windows.