On the side of the long room was a large clock-dial, bearing these words: 

          Youthis the Seed-time of life.

I had indulged in a prejudice, up to that hour, that youth was the budding time of life, and this clock-dial, perpetually twitting me with its seedy moral, always had a forbidding look to my vernal apprehension.

I was put into a seat with an older and much bigger boy, or youth, with a fuliginous complexion, a dilating and whitening nostril, and a singularly malignant scowl.  Many years afterwards he committed an act of murderous violence, and ended by going to finish his days in a madhouse.  His delight was to kick my shins with all his might, under the desk, not at all as an act of hostility, but as a gratifying and harmless pastime.  Finding this, so far as I was concerned, equally devoid of pleasure and profit, I managed to get a seat by another boy, the son of a very distinguished divine.  He was bright enough, and more select in his choice of recreations, at least during school hours, than my late homicidal neighbor.  But the principal called me up presently, and cautioned me against him as a dangerous companion.  Could it be so?  If the son of that boy’s father could not be trusted, what boy in Christendom could?  It seemed like the story of the youth doomed to be slain by a lion before reaching a certain age, and whose fate found him out in the heart of the tower where his father had shut him up for safety.  Here was I, in the very dove’s nest of Puritan faith, and out of one of its eggs a serpent had been hatched and was trying to nestle in my bosom!  I parted from him, however, none the worse for his companionship so far as I can remember.

Of the boys who were at school with me at Andover one has acquired great distinction among the scholars of the land.  One day I observed a new boy in a seat not very far from my own.  He was a little fellow, as I recollect him, with black hair and very bright black eyes, when at length I got a chance to look at them.  Of all the new-comers during my whole year he was the only one whom the first glance fixed in my memory, but there he is now, at this moment, just as he caught my eye on the morning of his entrance.  His head was between his hands (I wonder if he does not sometimes study in that same posture nowadays!) and his eyes were fastened to his book as if he had been reading a will that made him heir to a million.  I feel sure that Professor Horatio Balch Hackett will not find fault with me for writing his name under this inoffensive portrait.  Thousands of faces and forms that I have known more or less familiarly have faded from my remembrance, but this presentment of the youthful student, sitting there entranced over the page of his text-book,—­the child-father of the distinguished scholar that was to be,—­is not a picture framed and hung up in my mind’s gallery, but a fresco on its walls, there to remain so long as they hold together.