"A."
"'Stha-a-t?"
"B."
"Sna-a-a-t?"
"C."
"Sna-a-a-t?"
"D." &c.
I looked upon these operations with intense curiosity and no small respect, until my own turn came. I went up to the schoolmistress with some emotion, and when she said, rather spitefully, as I thought, "Make your obeisance!" my little intellects all fled away, and I did nothing. Having waited a second, gazing at me with indignation, she laid her hand on the top of my head, and gave it a jerk which made my teeth clash. I believe I bit my tongue a little; at all events, my sense of dignity was offended, and when she pointed to A, and asked what it was, it swam before me dim and hazy, and as big as a full moon. She repeated the question, but I was doggedly silent. Again, a third time, she said, "What's that?" I replied: "Why don't you tell me what it is? I didn't come here to learn you your letters." I have not the slightest remembrance of this, for my brains were all a wool-gathering; but as Aunt Delight affirmed it to be a fact, and it passed into a tradition in my family, I put it in.
What immediately followed I do not clearly remember, but one result is distinctly traced in my memory. In the evening of this eventful day the schoolmistress paid my parents a visit, and recounted to their astonished ears this my awful contempt of authority. My father, after hearing the story, got up and went away; but my mother, who was a careful disciplinarian, told me not to do so again! I always had a suspicion that both of them smiled on one side of their faces, even while they seemed to sympathize with the old lady on the other; still, I do not affirm it, for I am bound to say of both my parents, that I never knew them, even in trifles, say one thing while they meant another.
I believe I achieved the alphabet that summer, but my after progress, for a long time, I do not remember. Two years later I went to the winter school at the same place, kept by Lewis Olmstead—a man who made a business of ploughing, mowing, carting manure, &c., in the summer, and of teaching school in the winter; with a talent for music at all seasons, wherefore he became chorister upon occasion, when, peradventure, Deacon Hawley could not officiate. He was a celebrity in ciphering, and Squire Seymour declared that he was the greatest "arithmeticker" in Fairfield county. All I remember of his person is his hand, which seemed to me as big as Goliath's, judging by the claps of thunder it made in my ears on one or two occasions.