the solitary survivor on one side or the other decided the victory,
and even before I was seven I was generally that survivor. I read
insatiably all the good story-books they would let me have, and I
cannot recall the time at which there was anything even in the Bible
new to me. With an incipient passion for nature and animal life, I
read with delight all the books of natural history I could get, and I
have heard in later years that in all the community of Sabbatarianism
I was known as a prodigy. Fortunately I was saved from a probable
idiocy in my later life by a severe attack of typhoid fever at seven,
out of which attack I came a model of stupidity, and so remained until
I was fourteen, my thinking powers being so completely suspended that
at the dame's school to which I was sent I was repeatedly flogged for
not comprehending the simplest things. I got through simple arithmetic
as far as "Long Division," and there had to turn back to the beginning
three times before I could be made to understand the principle of
division by more than one figure.

In the humiliation of this period of my life, in which I came to
consider myself as little better than a fool, my only consolation was
the large liberty I enjoyed in the woods and fields with my father
on Saturdays, or with my brothers Charles and Jacob on their long
botanizing excursions, or in the moments of leisure when I was not
wanted to turn the grindstone or blow the bellows in the workshop.
Those long walks, in which I was indefatigable, and the days or nights
when I went fishing with my brother Jacob, who was ten years older
than myself, and who inherited the wandering and adventurous longings
of my father, are the only things I can remember of this period which
gave me any pleasure. I can see vividly the banks of the Mohawk, where
we used to fish for perch, bream, and pike-perch; recall where, with
my brother Charles, we found the rarer flowers of the valley, the