Excerpt from Soundings

Emmons, the custodian, looked on with kindly smile. He refused nothing and skipped nothing, whether history, medicine, or theology, albeit sometimes a little staggered by hard words in such tough works as Lardner on the Logos. But the difficulties only stimulated his desire to conquer them, and so, when one day he discovered, in a chamber cupboard of a family at the City Mills, a Latin grammar, he felt that his fortune was made. That incident he afterward marked as the determining point of his whole future life. Alone and unaided, in the intervals of farm labor, he wrestled with the unknown tongue. Soon after he purchased, in Providence, an Ainsworth's Dic tionary for a dollar and a half, which nearly emptied his pocket, and in due time secured a Virgil. He was not yet fifteen. For two years he worked patiently by himself, with such good effect that some of the leading gentlemen of the place urged that he should have a college education.

Just at this time, in 1829, Rev. Elam Smalley was settled in Franklin as the successor of Dr. Emmons. Mortimer's grandfather one day hinted to him that if the new minister would hear his recitations, he would pay the tuition. No grass grew under his feet that day as he hurried to the minister's, and finding him responsive, syste matic study was begun forthwith. The young parson was pleased with his pupil, assuring his landlady that the boy learned as easily as water runs down hill.

In the same winter a German Jew named Seixas, whilom a teacher of Hebrew at Harvard, came to live in town, and gathered a Hebrew class from the neighboring ministers. Jacob Ide and Sewell Harding, of Medway, and Elisha Fisk, of Wren tham, were in the class, and so was Mortimer Blake, by Mr. Smalley's Special suggestion; and the shrewd Jew kept the clergy wide awake at their work by now and then calling up the lad in the corner to prompt them when they lagged.

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.