house, but coming into town quite late, planned to lodge with a friend there.  He threw gravel at this young man’s window in the third story to waken him, and failing thought at last he would try the door, and if not locked he would creep up, and disturb no one.  But “Miss Sanborn knocked a man all the way downstairs” was duly announced.  I then realized my awful mistake, and didn’t care to appear on the street for some time except in recitation hours.

The second time I lectured in Burlington, I was delayed nearly half an hour at that dreadful Junction, about which place Professor Edward J. Phelps, afterwards Minister to England, wrote a fierce rhyme to relieve his rage at being compelled to waste so much precious time there.  I recall only two revengeful lines: 

“I hope in hell his soul may dwell,
Who first invented Essex Junction.”

Oh, yes, I do remember his idea that the cemetery near the station contained the bodies of many weary ones who had died just before help came and were shovelled over.

It happened that Mrs. Underwood, wife of the demented governor, who had alluded so truthfully to my lecture, was in the audience, and being gifted with genuine clairvoyant powers, she rose and begged the audience not to disperse, as she could distinctly see me pacing nervously up and down the platform at the Junction in a long sealskin coat and hat trimmed with band of fur.  I arrived at last with the sealskin and the hat, proving her correct, and they cheered her as well as myself.

Our little village had its share of eccentric characters, as the old man who was impelled by the edict of the Bible to cut off his right hand as it had “offended him.”  But lacking surgical facilities, the effort left one hand hanging limp and useless.  His long white beard, how truly patriarchal!

Poor insane Sally Duget—­a sad story!  Her epitaph in our cemetery is pathetic.  With all her woe she was quick at repartee.  A man once asked her, “Shall you ever marry, Sally?” “Well, yes, if you and I can make a bargain.”

Elder Bawker with his difficulties in locomotion.

Rogers, who carried the students’ washing home to his wife on Sunday afternoons for a preliminary soak.  The minister seeing him thus engaged, stopped him, and inquired: 

“Where do you think you will go to if you so constantly desecrate the Holy Sabbath?”

“Guess I’ll go right on doing laundry work for the boys.”

The aged janitor who, in a brief scare about smallpox, was asked if he had ever had it:  “No, but I’ve had chances.”

An old sinner who, being converted, used to serve as a lay evangelist at the district schoolhouse where in winter religious meetings were held.  Roguish lads to test him sprinkled red pepper, a lot of it, on the red hot stove.  He almost suffocated, but burst out with:  “By God, there’s enemies to religion in this house!  Hist the winders!”