The pastor’s house was fronted with huge white fluted pillars of wood, upholding a porch roof which shaded the second floor windows.  The doors in that house had a short-waisted effect with little panels above and long panels below.  I had a chamber so clean and small that I called it in my mind the Monk’s Cell, nearly filled with the high posted bed, the austere table and chairs.  The whitewashed walls were bare of pictures, except a painted portrait of Stephen Williams, pastor of Longmeadow from 1718 to 1783.  Daily his laughing eyes watched me as if he found my pretensions a great joke.  He had a long nose, and a high forehead.  His black hair crinkled, and a merry crease drew its half circle from one cheek around under his chin to the other.

Longmeadow did not receive me without much question and debate.  There were Williamses in every direction; disguised, perhaps, for that generation, under the names of Cooley, Stebbins, Colter, Ely, Hole, and so on.  A stately Sarah Williams, as Mrs. Storrs, sat at the head of the pastor’s table.  Her disapproval was a force, though it never manifested itself except in withdrawal.  If Mrs. Storrs had drawn back from me while I lived under her roof, I should have felt an outcast indeed.  The subtle refinement of those Longmeadow women was like the hinted sweetness of arbutus flower.  Breeding passed from generation to generation.  They had not mixed their blood with the blood of any outsiders; and their forbears were English yeomen.

I threw myself into books as I had done during my first months at De Chaumont’s, before I grew to think of Madame de Ferrier.  One of those seven years I spent at Dartmouth.  But the greater part of my knowledge I owe to Pastor Storrs.  Greek and Hebrew he gave me to add to the languages I was beginning to own; and he unlocked all his accumulations of learning.  It was a monk’s life that I lived; austere and without incident, but bracing as the air of the hills.  The whole system was monastic, though abomination alighted on that word in Longmeadow.  I took the discipline into my blood.  It will go down to those after me.

There a man had to walk with God whether he wanted to or not.

Living was inexpensive, each item being gaged by careful housekeeping.  It was a sin to gorge the body, and godly conversation was better than abundance.  Yet the pastor’s tea-table arises with a halo around it.  The rye and Indian bread, the doughnuts fragrant as flowers, the sparing tea, the prim mats which saved the cloth, the wire screen covering sponge cake—­how sacred they seem!

The autumn that I came to Longmeadow, Napoleon Bonaparte was beaten on the sea by the English, but won the battle of Austerlitz, defeating the Russian coalition and changing the map of Europe.

I felt sometimes a puppet while this man played his great part.  It was no comfort that others of my house were nothing to France.  Though I did not see Louis Philippe again, he wandered in America two or three years, and went back to privacy.