In the spring of 1855, with eight or ten dollars in my pocket which
Father had advanced me, I made my first visit to New York by steamer
from Catskill, on my way to New Jersey in quest of a position as
school-teacher. Three of our neighborhood boys were then teaching
in or near Plainfield, and I sought them out, having my first ride
on the cars on that trip from Jersey City. As I sat there in my
seat waiting for the train to start, I remember I actually wondered
if the starting would be so sudden as to jerk my hat off!

I was too late to find a vacancy in any of the schools in the districts
I visited. On one occasion I walked from Somerville twelve miles to a
village where there was a vacancy, but the trustees, after looking me
over, concluded I was too young and inexperienced for their large
school. That night the occultation of Venus by the moon took place.
I remember gazing at it long and long.

On my return in May I stopped in New York and spent a day prowling
about the second-hand bookstalls, and spent so much of my money
for books that I had only enough left to carry me to Griffin's
Corners, twelve miles from home. I bought Locke's "Essay on the
Human Understanding," Dr. Johnson's works, Saint-Pierre's "Studies
of Nature," and Dick's works and others. Dick was a Scottish
philosopher whose two big fat volumes held something that caught
my mind as I dipped into them. But I got little from him and soon
laid him aside. On this and other trips to New York I was always
drawn by the second-hand bookstalls. How I hovered about them,
how good the books looked, how I wanted them all! To this day,
when I am passing them, the spirit of those days lays its hand
upon me, and I have to pause a few moments and, half-dreaming,
half-longing, run over the titles. Nearly all my copies of the