My father was very simple and positive in his beliefs, always openly foremost in the reform movements of his day and in his neighborhood, yet never, to my knowledge, seeking or taking any office.  His house often became a station of the “underground railroad” in slavery times, and on one night in the depth of winter he took a hotly-pursued fugitive in his sleigh and drove him five miles on the ice, diagonally across the Hudson, to Fishkill, thence putting the brave aspirant for freedom on the way to other friends.  He incurred several risks in this act.  It is rarely safe to drive on the river off the beaten tracks at night, for there are usually air-holes, and the strong tides are continually making changes in the ice.  When told that he might be sent to jail for his defiance of the Fugitive Slave Law, he quietly answered, “I can go to jail.”  The thing he could not do was to deny the man’s appeal to him for help.  Before the war he was known as an Abolitionist—­after it, as a Conservative, his sympathy with and for the South being very strong.  During the draft riots in 1863 the spirit of lawlessness was on the point of breaking out in the river towns.  I happened to be home from Virginia, and learned that my father’s house was among those marked for burning on a certain night.  During this night the horde gathered; but one of their leaders had received such empathetic warning of what would happen the following day should outrages be perpetrated, that he persuaded his associates to desist.  I sat up that night at my father’s door with a double-barrelled gun, more impressed with a sense of danger than at any other time in my experience; he, on the contrary, slept as quietly as a child.

He often practiced close economy in order to give his sons a good education.  The one act of my life which I remember with unalloyed pride and pleasure occurred while I was at boarding-school in Vermont, preparing for college.  I learned through my mother that my father had denied himself his daily newspaper; and I knew well how much he would miss it.  We burned wood in the large stone seminary building.  Every autumn great ranks of hard maple were piled up, and students who wished to earn a little money were paid a dollar a cord for sawing it into three lengths.  I applied for nine cords, and went at the unaccustomed task after study hours.  My back aches yet as I recall the experiences of subsequent weeks, for the wood was heavy, thick, and hard as bone.  I eventually had the pleasure of sending to my father the subscription price of his paper for a year.  If a boy reads these lines, let me assure him that he will never know a sweeter moment in his life than when he receives the thanks of his parents for some such effort in their behalf.  No investment can ever pay him better.

In one of my books, “Nature’s Serial Story,” my father and mother appear, slightly idealized.