mortar.  We stretched a deer-skin over a hoop, burned holes in it with the prongs of a fork, sifted our meal, baked our bread, eat it, and it was first-rate eating, too.  We raised, or gathered out of the woods, our own tea.  We had sage, bohea, cross-vine, spice, and sassafras teas in abundance.  As for coffee, I am not sure that I ever smelled it for ten years.  We made our sugar out of the water of the maple-tree, and our molasses, too.  These were great luxuries in those days.  We raised our own cotton and flax.  We water-rotted our flax, broke it by hand, scutched it, picked the seed out of the cotton with our fingers; our mothers and sisters carded, spun, and wove it into cloth, and they cut and made our garments and bed-clothes, etc.  And when we got on a new suit thus manufactured, and sallied out into company, we thought ourselves as big as any body.”

Young Peter grew up in this rough country with a constitution of iron, and a fair share of Western courage, independence, and energy.  He was sent by his father to a neighboring school, but the teacher was an indifferent one, and he learned merely to read and write and cipher imperfectly.

He was a “wild, wicked boy,” he tells us, and grew up to delight in horse-racing, card-playing, and dancing.  His father seems to have enjoyed having so dashing a son, but his mother, who was a pious woman, took his course seriously to heart, and wept and prayed over her boy as only a Christian mother can.  She often talked to him, and moved him so deeply that he frequently vowed to lead a better life; but his pleasures were too tempting, and he fell back again into his old habits.  His father presented him with a race-horse and a pack of cards, and he became known among his youthful companions as one of the most fearless riders and the luckiest fellow at cards in the county.  The good mother wept and prayed all the more, and the boy hid his cards from her to keep her from burning them.

In 1801, when he was sixteen years old, a change came over him.  He had been out with his father and brother to attend a wedding in the neighborhood.  The affair was conducted with all the uproarious merriment incident to those days, and when Peter returned home and began to think over it, he felt condemned at having passed his time in such a manner.  “My mother was in bed,” says he.  “It seemed to me, all of a sudden, my blood rushed to my head, my heart palpitated, in a few minutes I turned blind, an awful impression rested on my mind that death had come to me and I was unprepared to die.  I fell on my knees and began to ask God to have mercy on me.  My mother sprang from her bed, and was soon on her knees by my side, praying for me, and exhorting me to look to Christ for mercy, and then and there I promised the Lord if he would spare me I would seek and serve Him, and I never fully broke that promise.  My mother prayed for me a long time.  At length we lay down, but there was little sleep for me.