A letter which he wrote in 1865 bears witness to the trait which his teacher had already noted—his careful observation. He made pen-and-ink drawings to make clear what flower he was trying to identify, which was plainly the false foxglove.
“I have been out in several places and have stuck in as much as ten stakes in different places where those beautiful scarlet or crimson lilies grow and when the stalk has gone I will take them up. Saturday I intend to go out in search of some more. There are plenty of them, and sometimes I see them two or three on one stalk.
“Do you know what the large trumpet-creeper is that has very large flowers of a red color? One used to grow at the east end of the back piazza up against the side of the house. Well, there is a flower of the same shape and kind of a beautiful yellow color, but it grows like a primrose; on one stalk there are over 20 flowers of about an inch and a half in length. The tops of the buds seem to be lapped over each other, and when there are blossoms they look very pretty. I am going to try and get it for you, but I don’t know whether it has seed or not. I suppose not. Nevertheless, I’ll try and get it for you, for it is very pretty.
“In a garden up here there is a kind of ‘Columbine,’ very large, of two kinds, purple and white and very large. I am welcome to all the seed that I want. I don’t know whether you want any or not, but nevertheless I’ll get you a lot.
“Here I must stop. I remain
“Your aff. son Willie.”
The boy was fortunate in his mother, whose fine nature, trained tastes, and Christian spirit moved and moulded the best there was in him. Her letters to the little pupil are models of maternal sympathy, and reflect very vividly the boy’s strong passion for living things and the study of them. One of her characteristic messages went to him in 1862, and reveals her own interest in the pursuits which were delighting her children and which were destined to mean so much to the boy she was writing to:
“How are your friends and dear companions, the worms? I missed them very much after you had gone, and often found myself stepping carefully and looking down to the right and the left in crossing the upper hall, expecting to see some green or brown thing crawling about. The great drawer I gave you, we call ‘the worm drawer’ yet, and I don’t know as I shall ever open it comfortably again. The peaceable and innocent rolls of linen and sewing lie in it now, just as they used before you had it, but sometimes I forget and open the one under it cautiously, expecting to see some of your treasures dropped through again, on my things. Henry and Julie are making collections now also, and Cottie brought home, the other day, the finest, largest specimen I ever saw, of the sort you called ‘Polyphemus’? It was of immense size, and a very bright healthy color, both in its body and in those little tufts that stud it all over. He laid it away very carefully, and left it in peace a few days, and yesterday, behold it had spun a cocoon in its box as large as a butternut, and as strong as linen, of a beautiful reddish brown. We shall expect the moth with great interest. The children are too impatient to hurry up business with their worms. They are forever opening the boxes, and lifting and handling the creatures, so that I should think the poor things would despair of ever getting a chance to set their houses in order, at all.”
His relations with his mother were always close and sympathetic. She was a rare nature, refined and cultivated, with a strong literary bent and deep religious feeling. She wrote not a little, contributing to the pages of “The Christian Union” and other publications. She scrupulously kept all the boy’s letters from his schooldays forward through the years. One of the cherished mementos of her life was a little manuscript volume, which bears the inscription: “I leave this book to my son William.” It is a record of her study of the Bible, her grapple with the great problems of ethical and theological thought, prayers in which she has uttered the aspirations of a reverent spirit insistently seeking light through all the confusion and shadow of modern speculation, comment upon the great books which were stirring Christendom and sounding the note of the new thought about Christ and Christianity. To read them is to discover the sources of the son’s deep reverence and broad, unconventional religious life. It is to feel anew the unconscious power of motherhood in shaping the ductile spirit of childhood, and to be certain that the light of such a spirit was a very pillar of fire to the soul of her son.