the hero of Lundy's Lane. Owing to poor health, Mr. Paine, sen., soon
abandoned the law for other pursuits. He was familiar with the
representative English authors, and specially fond of the Greek language
and literature, which he cultivated during his life. He had a tenacious
memory, and could quote Homer by the page. Henry Paine's mother, Jane
Thomson Warren, was the daughter of Ebenezer T. Warren, of Foxborough,
the brother of General Joseph Warren, who fell at Bunker Hill. Of the
three children of Lemuel and Jane T. (Warren) Paine, Henry William was
the second.

After the usual preparatory education, Mr. Paine entered Waterville
College (now Colby University) in 1826, and graduated in 1830, at the
age of twenty, with the highest honor of his class. During the last year
of the college course, he was principal of Waterville Academy, then just
founded for the preparation of young men for college. He spent eight
hours a day in charge of his pupils, of whom there were eighty-two, and
at the same time kept up with his class in the college studies. As a
teacher he was greatly beloved and respected by his pupils, whose
affection was won by no lack of discipline, but by his kindly sympathy,
encouragement, and watchful aid in their studies. He had an eye that
could beam with tenderness, or dart lightnings; and it was a fine moral
spectacle, illustrating the superiority of mental over physical force,
to see a bully of the school, almost twice his size, and who,
apparently, could have crushed him if he chose, quail under his eagle
gaze, when arraigned at the principal's desk for a misdemeanor. It is
doubtful if ever he flogged a scholar; but he sometimes brought the
ruler down upon the desk with a force that made the schoolroom ring, and
inspired the lawless with a very wholesome respect for his authority.
The fact that from that day to this his office has always been a kind of
Mecca, to which his old pupils, whether dwellers in "Araby the Blest" or