to Elizabeth Cady." I never look at these books without a feeling of
thankfulness that in childhood I was blessed with such a friend and
teacher.

I can truly say, after an experience of seventy years, that all the
cares and anxieties, the trials and disappointments of my whole life,
are light, when balanced with my sufferings in childhood and youth from
the theological dogmas which I sincerely believed, and the gloom
connected with everything associated with the name of religion, the
church, the parsonage, the graveyard, and the solemn, tolling bell.
Everything connected with death was then rendered inexpressibly
dolorous. The body, covered with a black pall, was borne on the
shoulders of men; the mourners were in crape and walked with bowed
heads, while the neighbors who had tears to shed, did so copiously and
summoned up their saddest facial expressions. At the grave came the
sober warnings to the living and sometimes frightful prophesies as to
the state of the dead. All this pageantry of woe and visions of the
unknown land beyond the tomb, often haunted my midnight dreams and
shadowed the sunshine of my days. The parsonage, with its bare walls and
floors, its shriveled mistress and her blind sister, more like ghostly
shadows than human flesh and blood; the two black servants, racked with
rheumatism and odoriferous with a pungent oil they used in the vain hope
of making their weary limbs more supple; the aged parson buried in his
library in the midst of musty books and papers--all this only added to
the gloom of my surroundings. The church, which was bare, with no
furnace to warm us, no organ to gladden our hearts, no choir to lead our
songs of praise in harmony, was sadly lacking in all attractions for the
youthful mind. The preacher, shut up in an octagonal box high above our
heads, gave us sermons over an hour long, and the chorister, in a
similar box below him, intoned line after line of David's Psalms, while,