bruised. The event comes back to me as if it were but yesterday. For
weeks after his departure I longed for him day and night and the
experience still shines like a star in my boyhood life. I never saw him
again until two years ago when, knowing he lived there, a practising
physician, I hunted him up in San Francisco. I found him a sedate gray-
haired man, with no hint, of course, of the child I had known and loved
more than sixty years before. It has been my experience on several
occasions to hunt up friends of my youth after the lapse of more than
half a century. Last spring I had a letter from a pupil of mine in the
first school I ever taught, in 1854 or '55. I had not seen or heard from
him in all those years when he recalled himself to my mind. The name I
had not forgotten, Roswell Beach, but the face I had. Only two weeks
ago, being near his town, it occurred to me to look him up. I did so and
was shocked to find him on his deathbed. Too weak to raise his head from
his pillow he yet threw his arms around me and spoke my name many times
with marked affection. He died a few days later. I was to him what some
of my old teachers were to me--stars that never set below my horizon.

My boyish liking for girls was quite different from my liking for boys--
there was little or no sense of comradeship in it. When I was eight or
nine years old there was one girl in the school toward whom I felt very
partial, and I thought she reciprocated till one day I suddenly saw how
little she cared for me. The teacher had forbidden us to put our feet
upon the seats in front of us. In a spirit of rebellion, I suppose, when
the teacher was not looking, I put my brown, soil-stained bare feet upon
the forbidden seat. Polly quickly spoke up and said, "Teacher, Johnny
Burris put his feet on the seat"--what a blow it was to me for her to
tell on me! Like a cruel frost those words nipped the tender buds of my
affection and they never sprouted again. Years after, her younger
brother married my younger sister, and maybe that unkind cut of our