handsome visage and graceful delivery won the admiration of a young lady
of sixteen, who was on a visit to Aurora. Three years afterward they
were married. My mother, Louisa Frances Morrell, was a native of
Morristown, New Jersey; and her ancestors were among the founders of
that beautiful town. Her maternal great-grandfather was the Rev. Dr.
Timothy Johnes, the pastor of the Presbyterian Church, who administered
the sacrament of the Lord's Supper to General Washington. Her paternal
great-grandfather was the Rev. Azariah Horton, pastor of a church near
Morristown, and an intimate friend of the great President Edwards. The
early settlers of Aurora were people of culture and refinement; and the
village is now widely known as the site of Wells College, among whose
graduates is the popular wife of ex-President Cleveland.

In the days of my childhood the march of modern improvements had hardly
begun. There was a small steamboat plying on the Cayuga Lake. There was
not a single railway in the whole State. When I went away to school in
New Jersey, at the age of thirteen, the tedious journey by the
stagecoach required three days and two nights; every letter from home
cost eighteen cents for postage; and the youngsters pored over Webster's
spelling-books and Morse's geography by tallow candles; for no gas lamps
had been dreamed of and the wood fires were covered, in most houses, by
nine o'clock on a winter evening. There was plain living then, but not a
little high thinking. If books were not so superabundant as in these
days, they were more thoroughly appreciated and digested.

My father, who was just winning a brilliant position at the Cayuga
County Bar, died in June, 1826, at the early age of twenty-eight, when I
was but four and one-half years old. The only distinct recollections
that I have of him are his leading me to school in the morning, and that
he once punished me for using a profane word that I had heard from some