threescore years, one of the most vivid of my life. It was a rapture
and an interesting case of heredity, for I had not before been within
a hundred and fifty miles of the sea.

And how ecstatic was the sensation of the plunge into the breakers,
holding fast to my mother's hand, and then the race up the beach
before the next comber, trembling lest it should catch me, as if it
were a living thing ready to devour me. They never come back, these
first emotions of childhood; and though I have loved the sea all my
life, I have never again felt the sight of it as then.

Of this first period, I remember very well the grand occasion of the
opening of the Hudson and Mohawk Railroad, the first link in that line
which is now the New York Central, and see vividly the curious old
coaches,--three coach bodies together on one truck. This was in
1832, when I was four years old. The road was, I believe, the first
successful passenger railway in America, and was sixteen miles long,
with two inclined planes up which the trains were drawn, and down
which they were lowered by cables. There was an opposition line of
stagecoaches between Albany and Schenectady, running at the same price
and making the same time.

Of the second period, that of nature worship, was my first trout,
another delirium. My mother had taken me to visit one of her brothers,
a farmer in the western section of New York, soon after made famous
by the anti-rent war, in which my uncle was one of the "Indian
Chiefs[1]," and there I went fishing in the brook that ran through his
farm. I caught a small trout and did not know what fish it might be,
till I saw the crimson spots on his side and remembered that the trout
in books bore them, and then I threw him on the grass and danced