ries, which he afterwards began to carefully arrange, as he said, into "something like a series of landmarks, so that by-and-by, when I want to trace back my way from manhood to youth, they will help me to find it, though it be wholly covered with weeds."

There

But "weeds" never grew in that soil. was no place for them, as you can readily see for how can there be room for weeds where the ground is tilled and watched and filled to completeness with useful growths, as his life was?

When he was seventeen, he made an end of keeping his journal on stitched leaves, but went to the store where the Dictionary was bought, and procured a Brown's Almanac, which was published by the bookseller. He says: "It was a humble affair, but I esteemed it highly, for it was a long step in the way of improvement. No law student ever thumbed his new English Blackstone with more cherishing satisfaction than did I my newbought treasure. Father suggested that, as there would be room enough besides what I needed to record each day's work, that therefore I should keep an expense account in it, day by day, which I did. Some days were a little crowded, and were pieced out on the margins, but never were days'

work so long nor varied that I wasn't able to get seven of them into a single page."

In this manner, he kept it for three years; and then he says he "branched out still larger, and got me a blank book, where I had unlimited space for any or all days." When he came to have spare money afterwards, he had those little almanacs bound up in one volume, "by which means they will not get lost, or will get lost together."

All these things show what a painstaking, considerate person he was, how he venerated the past, and what importance he attached to the influences which shape a boy's character as he is growing to manhood. He not only kept up the journals "fairly and squarely," but soon began in writingbooks, which he afterwards had bound, to copy other things, where you see the antiquarian spirit at work gathering up "fragments of history, curious scraps, and things new and old, which I esteem highly now, not only as the relics of long nights after days of tedious toil, but as indicating the turn my mind was taking then, before it had been shaped at all by habits of discipline, thought, or systematic study."

"By moving into the neighborhood of a seat of learning," he said, "the Philomathic seeds" of his nature were stirred. That word became the name of a little club of three, which he was the means of forming. One of the number was a young farmer, the other a village boy going to school when there was one, going fishing, working out haying; but all had certain tastes in common, and they agreed to have a club and meet once a week for social intercourse and mental improvement, to talk over things they all liked, or discuss those they did not agree about. They met in a room over the village store; and, at first, had not the least idea of what would grow out of their coming together.

They all agreed, however, in the desire to be learning, and began at once to have original essays. Our young antiquarian had brought with him from Vermont his boyish collection of relics and specimens, and before long a cabinet of curiosities, starting from this, was among their properties. The father of the farmer member finished off a room for them in the attic of his house on "Beech Hill," fitting it up with cupboards and shelves, and they moved their things in, and dedicated it, with appropriate ceremonies, "To the use of the Philomathic Club forever." But the house eventually passed into other hands, and twelve years from the time of the dedication, the great change of name to the New Hampshire State Antiquarian Society took place, by which the accumulation of articles was removed to the village where they now are, somewhat remote from the great activities of the world, and bearing one of the pretty Indian names which Whittier has sung in his legendary verse, Contoocook.

But there is a bit of the past life of the boy which must come in here. He had had from his childhood such a regard for old customs and things, that as he went about, as boys do, where an old house was being altered or torn down, he would secure a sample of the wall paper, or of the nails, or something; and in his little journeys (perhaps going to that very "Sodom" to mill, or to Montpelier, or visiting the relatives of his parents, who were both of Pilgrim descent, from Governor Bradford and Edward Doty), he was always picking up curiosities and relics, which he took good care of and learned the history of. So that he had the beginnings of a cabinet even then.

Afterwards, while working twelve hours a day

remember when the hand-cards, the hatchel, the spinning-wheel and the loom were things used in every house. When we ate off blue crockery, on which were pictures of Chinese pagodas, boats, men, women and umbrellas, that did violence to all the laws of perspective, known or unknown. But the generation now growing will have no such recollection. We have, therefore, saved some things such as our fathers and mothers used. . . . We do not make any pretence about them, but such as they are, we are glad to show them to anybody that wants to see them."

Nearly all the things have a story to tell. There in the little room, amidst a collection of bonnets long out of fashion, and therefore queer and ludicrous in our eyes, is the identical one that Molly Stark wore that brave wife of that brave old soldier who is said before the battle of Bennington to have addressed his troops in these words: "There, my boys, are your enemies, the red coats and tories; you must beat them, or my wife sleeps a widow to-night;" or as tradition has it, "Molly Stark is a widow." The bonnet which was given by a lady of the Stark family to the Society, is a great sugar-scoop leghorn, durable enough to have dated back, so far as the quality goes, to these Revolutionary days when she was with her husband in camp when General Washington entered Boston after the British embarkation.

There are corners of mirrors, corners with a great show of swords, and drapery of battle flags; arrays of antique and odd-looking ink stands, candlesticks and flasks, snow shoes and pipes; lanterns, quaint crockery; an ancient sign board; furniture scores of years behind the times; a venerable secretary, a melodeon with a long history, an axe of a shape that had gone out of

use more than a hundred years ago, and tools our great-great-grandsires worked with, cooking utensils our great-great-grand-dames cooked with, which we should not know even the names of.

Hardly anything among these aged and singular articles appeals more to one's imagination, if one be imaginative and likes to picture the past, than a cow bell and a dinner shell. The rude bell was worn by cattle almost as far back as the Revolutionary War, on some settler's new place beyond the Connecticut River, that the creatures might more easily be found in the forest. And the shell which was brought from the West Indies in 1709, has descended from one to another of the same family, "has called in its one hundred and fifty years of service, six generations of laborers to their meals, the first of which were the greatgrandchildren of those who came in the Mayflower, and if not destroyed by violence, is good for a thousand years to come." One thing amidst all the documents and archives and priceless relics touches me with pathos at the homely, home-living idea a handful of beans, with a history, a pedigree indeed! A certain man gave to his daughter's husband a handful of beans to plant, and the same kind has been planted, without fail, by his sons, every year since, till the fifty-third generation of beans is represented here. It is like the Scituate corn, which, as the inhabitants there claim, has come straight along, unmixed and uncorrupted, from seed the Indians gave the first settlers of that ancient town by the sea.

The Society, whose humble beginnings have thus been indicated, has its permanence provided for; since if it cease, for any reason, to exist under its present condition, it becomes by its constitution, the property of the State Historical Society.