farm boys have. I was fond of the girls back as early as I can
remember, and had my sweethearts at a very early age. . . .

I learned my letters at school, when I was five or six, in the
old-fashioned way by being called up to the teacher several times
a day and naming the letters as he pointed at them where they stood
in a perpendicular column in Cobb's Spelling-Book. The vowels and
consonants stood in separate columns, and had to be learned one by
one, by continued repetition. It took me a long time, I remember,
to distinguish /b/ from /d/, and /c/ from /e/. When and how I learned to
read I do not remember. I recall Cobb's Second Reader, and later
Olney's Geography, and then Dayballs Arithmetic.

I went to school summers till I was old enough to help on the farm,
say at the age of eleven or twelve, when my schooling was confined
to the winters.

[Illustration: The Old Schoolhouse, Roxbury, New York. From a
photograph by M.H. Fanning]

As a boy, the only farm work that appealed to me was sugar-making in
the maple woods in spring. This I thoroughly enjoyed. It brought
me near to wild nature and was freer from routine than other farm
work. Then I soon managed to gather a little harvest of my own from
the sugar bush. I used to anticipate the general tapping by a
few days or a week, and tap a few trees on my own account along
the sunny border of the Woods, and boil the sap down on the kitchen
stove (to the disgust of the womenfolks), selling the sugar in the
village. I think the first money I ever earned came to me in this
way. My first algebra and first grammar I bought with some of this