The historian has properly said that the names of Benjamin Waite and his companion in their perilous journey through the wilderness to Canada should ``be memorable in all the sad or happy homes of this Connecticut valley forever.’’ The child who was my friend in youth, and to whom I may allude occasionally hereafter in my narrative, bore the name of one of the survivors of this Indian outrage, a name to be revered as a remembrancer of sacrifice and heroism.

II

THE BIRTH OF A NEW PASSION

When I was thirteen years old I went to visit my Uncle Cephas.  My grandmother would not have parted with me even for that fortnight had she not actually been compelled to.  It happened that she was called to a meeting of the American Tract Society, and it was her intention to pay a visit to her cousin, Royall Eastman, after she had discharged the first and imperative duty she owed the society.  Mrs. Deacon Ranney was to have taken me and provided for my temporal and spiritual wants during grandmother’s absence, but at the last moment the deacon came down with one of his spells of quinsy, and no other alternative remained but to pack me off to Nashua, where my Uncle Cephas lived.

This involved considerable expense, for the stage fare was three shillings each way:  it came particularly hard on grandmother, inasmuch as she had just paid her road tax and had not yet received her semi-annual dividends on her Fitchburg Railway stock.  Indifferent, however, to every sense of extravagance and to all other considerations except those of personal pride, I rode away atop of the stage-coach, full of exultation.  As we rattled past the Waite house I waved my cap to Captivity and indulged in the pleasing hope that she would be lonesome without me.  Much of the satisfaction of going away arises from the thought that those you leave behind are likely to be wretchedly miserable during your absence.

My Uncle Cephas lived in a house so very different from my grandmother’s that it took me some time to get used to the place.  Uncle Cephas was a lawyer, and his style of living was not at all like grandmother’s; he was to have been a minister, but at twelve years of age he attended the county fair, and that incident seemed to change the whole bent of his life.  At twenty-one he married Samantha Talbott, and that was another blow to grandmother, who always declared that the Talbotts were a shiftless lot.  However, I was agreeably impressed with Uncle Cephas and Aunt ’Manthy, for they welcomed me very cordially and turned me over to my little cousins, Mary and Henry, and bade us three make merry to the best of our ability.  These first favorable impressions of my uncle’s family were confirmed when I discovered that for supper we had hot biscuit and dried beef warmed up in cream gravy, a diet which, with all due respect to grandmother, I considered much more desirable than dry bread and dried-apple sauce.