temporarily into the upper heavens. Unlike these unfortunates,
however, I presently got acclimated; other boys of my age appeared,
and numbers of little girls (Mary Warren among them), and now society
occupied all my thoughts. The lady of the house got up private
theatricals--"Beauty and the Beast" was the play. I was cast for the
parts of the Second Sister and of the Beast; Mary Warren was the
Beauty. I got by heart not only my own lines, but those of all the
other performers and the stage directions. The play was received with
applause, and after it was done the actors were feted; my father was
not present, but he appeared greatly diverted by my account of the
proceedings. He was probably testing me in various ways to see what I
was made of, and whether anything could be made of me. He encouraged
my predilection for natural history by getting me books on conchology
and taking me to museums to study the specimens and make pencil
drawings of them. In these avocations I was also companioned by Frank
Channing, whose specialty was ornithology, and who was making a series
of colored portraits of the birds in the museum, very cleverly done.

[IMAGE: WILLIAM HENRY CHANNING, 1855]

Frank was the son of the Rev. William Henry Channing, who was pastor
of a Unitarian church in Liverpool; he had brought his family to
England at about the same time that we came. He was a nephew, I
believe, of the William Ellery Channing who was one of the founders of
American Unitarianism, and the brother, therefore, of the Ellery
Channing of Concord. Frank inherited much of the talent of his family.
He was afterwards sent to Oxford, where he took the highest honors.
All intellectual operations came easy to him. He also showed a strong
proclivity to art, and he was wonderfully clever in all kinds of fine
handwork. He was at this time a tall and very handsome boy, about two