with Father, atop a load of butter. It was the time of year when
the farmers took their butter to Catskill. Father usually made two
trips. This was the first one of the season, and I accompanied him
as far as Ashland, where the Institute was located.

I remained at school there three months, the length of the winter
term, and studied fairly hard. I had a room by myself and enjoyed
the life with the two hundred or more boys and girls of my own age.
I studied algebra, geometry, chemistry, French, and logic, wrote
compositions, and declaimed in the chapel, as the rules required.
It was at this time that I first read Milton. We had to parse in
"Paradise Lost," and I recall how I was shocked and astonished by
that celestial warfare. I told one of my classmates that I did not
believe a word of it. Among my teachers was a young, delicate,
wide-eyed man who in later life became well known as Bishop Hurst,
of the Methodist Church. He heard our small class in logic at seven
o'clock in the morning, in a room that was never quite warmed by
the newly kindled fire. I don't know how I came to study logic
(Whately's). I had never heard of such a study before; maybe that
is why I chose it. I got little out of it. What an absurd study,
taught, as it was, as an aid to argumentation!--like teaching a man
to walk by explaining to him the mechanism of walking. The analysis
of one sound argument, or of one weak one, in terms of common sense,
is worth any amount of such stuff. But it was of a piece with
grammar and rhetoric as then taught--all preposterous studies viewed
as helps toward correct writing and speaking. Think of our parsing
Milton as an aid to mastering the English language!

I remember I stood fairly high in composition--only one boy in the
school ahead of me, and that was Herman Coons, to whom I became much