Confessions of Boyhood

It was thought best in New England country towns that boys, who were not needed on the farm and were not to be educated beyond the common school, should learn some trade. As my...

Then the dreadful preparations began. I saw the bed-clothing pulled back and the diseased limb exposed; it was twice its natural size. The surgeon was the once famous Dr. Miller...

In the small towns of Norfolk County, even as late as the middle of the nineteenth century, Christmas was not kept as a holiday. The people adhered mainly to the Congregational...

"At last we turned into a long lane and came to a large rambling farm house with barns all about it. A young man came to the doorstep to meet us. I was not in the habit of takin...

I grew old enough to do errands at longer and longer distances. It was in doing them that I at length crossed the bridge, an event as important to the child as the Rubicon to Ca...

In my sister's school besides good manners, which now seem to me the best part of my education, I learned to draw and to sing; and in which I delighted most, it were hard to say...

See me now no longer in a linen shirt and brown broadcloth jacket, but again in blue jean overalls, with grimy, oily hands and dirty face, shut in walls from which was no escape...

This incident, the thrashing of one boy and the withdrawal of several others, brought peace and good will into the school-room, and I became on intimate and even affectionate te...

The Dorr Rebellion was not long past when the terrifying prophecies of Rev. William Miller began to be preached. He had figured out by Biblical and historical dates that the wor...

The beech at last divides the rock in whose invisible seam its tiny seed was sown. I now began to spend all my leisure time in reading, and to be more and more aware of my unpro...

The revolution of the earth can only account for the flow of the Charles for there is no perceptible descent of the land. I like to think it is ruled by the stars and not by the...

After much counselling and agitating of the change, my mother moved from Bellingham, which was her native place, to Hopkinton; and, from this time forth to the end of her life,...

Produced by David Edwards, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from scanned images of public domain material...

With the discovery of certain books of ancient history, Plutarch, Euripides and Emerson's Essays there came an unexpected close to my student life at the Worcester Academy. Seve...