Poor father! He was a schoolmaster, too; how much
sorrow it might have spared him had he known of this! But we were
too scared to tell, I suppose. He had set his heart upon my taking
up his calling, and I hated the school from the day I first saw
it. Small wonder. The only study he succeeded in interesting me in
was English, because Charles Dickens's paper, _All the Year Round_,
came to the house with stories ever so much more alluring than the
tedious grammar. He was of the old dispensation, wedded to the
old ways. But the short cut I took to knowledge in that branch I
think opened his eyes to some things ahead of his time. Their day
had not yet come. He lived to see it dawn and was glad. I know how
he felt about it. I myself have lived down the day of the hogshead
in the child-life of New York. Some of the schools our women made
an end of a few years ago weren't much better. To help clean them
out was like getting square with the ogre that plagued my childhood.
I mind, too, my first collision with the tenement. There was just
one, and it stood over against the castle hill, separated from it
only by the dry moat.
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