later," he did not regret it. His companion was lively and pleasing in conversation, and the road to her home seemed very short." He never saw the young lady again; but years afterwards, he heard that she, having married well, and removed to Illinois, had named her first-born son for him who "went home with her " from Braintree.

Habits of temperance were inculcated and acquired, in childhood, beneath the parental roof, which characterized the man's subsequent life. Appetite was kept in liege subjection to the higher powers of his nature. Intoxicants had no charm to break this allegiance. While temperate himself, even to abstinence, he could, however, be tolerant towards those whose ways and opinions were unlike his own. The narcotic habit he never formed; indeed, he never touched tobacco in any shape but once. While teaching a winter school in Warner, in his nineteenth year, he took up a pipe, one morning, after breakfast, and, drawing a whiff or two, lost the forenoon's school! He needed no second trial; and with "the weed," in any form or use, he never afterwards had aught to do.

cess.

1835-1840.

IN the winter of 1834-35, succeeding his term at Hopkinton Academy, Walter Harrriman taught his first school. It was in the Schoodac district in Warner. Among his forty pupils were eight young men, from eighteen to twenty-two years of age, stout and full-grown, while the master, at that time, was of slight build, and looked very small in their presence. But he made his first school a sucHe had a natural gift for governing, and a good fund of common sense, upon which readily to draw in emergency. Another requisite to true success in the school-room he possessed in his great fondness for children and young people. The consequent sympathy was a magnetic bond between pupil and teacher, rendering the relation an easy and pleasant one. The following winter he taught on Pumpkin Hill, in Warner. Of that school he said, more than forty years later, "It was a very pleasant one to the master, and, it is presumed, not unprofitable to the scholars."

In the winter of 1836-37, when he was in his twentieth year, and had completed his own school education, a school was secured for him in Braintree, Mass., near Boston, by an older brother, residing temporarily in Quincy. Before this time, he had never been farther from home than Concord in his own county. In going to Braintree, he travelled by stage to Lowell, and thence to Boston by rail; for the Boston and Lowell Railroad, one of the first passenger roads in the United States, had then been running a short time. The cars in which he rode were very short, were entered at the side, and had each only four or five seats.

To the youth, hitherto home-tied, this journey was the interesting introduction to that long course of travel which, in after years, was to span nearly both hemispheres. Remaining a day in Boston, busily engaged in sight-seeing, he visited the places of special interest, such as the markets, the wharves, the Common, the State House, the Navy Yard, and the monument on Bunker Hill, then unfinished, and only eighty-two feet high.

Arriving in Braintree on Saturday night, he went to lodge with the agent of the district, the school of which he was to enter as teacher on the following Monday morning. He was an utter stranger, he looked young, and was quite diffident. The agent's wife was not favorably impressed by the personal appearance of the candidate for schoolmaster. After retiring for the night, the young man overheard, through the thin partition between his sleeping-room and that of the agent, a conversation, which ran as follows: Agent's Wife. "He can never get a certificate, and I would n't let him begin the school, till he'd been to see." Agent. "Tain't likely he'd come clear down here on Tom Fool's arrant."

Thereupon the deliberative couple fell asleep, and so did the listener. Monday morning came, and young Harriman entered upon his duties before going to the superintending committee for a certificate. In the evening he was taken by the agent before the chairman of the board, the Reverend Mr. M. The examination was thorough and protracted, and the agent was ever after proud to claim that "the master was ahead of the committee-man in every branch." He had a long term, and a large school of eightyfive pupils, and became weary in his work. But he succeeded so well that he was urged to finish out a hard school in another district, where the teacher had been overrun by unruly scholars and dismissed. Having, however, had enough of the school-master's life for one season, he declined the urgent invitation, and returned home.

Having worked out for Amos E. Putney, on a farm in old School District No. 8, four months, at thirteen dollars