I am proud to
say that this Potter Street gentleman, a nobleman if ever there was
one, although not really an uncle, was in some way related to my
father.
The recollections of boyhood, so far as week-days go, are very
happy. Sunday, however, was not happy. I was taken to a religious
service, morning and evening, and understood nothing. The evening
was particularly trying. The windows of the meeting-house streamed
inside with condensed breath, and the air we took into our lungs was
poisonous. Almost every Sunday some woman was carried out fainting.
Do what I could it was impossible to keep awake. When I was quite
little I was made to stand on the seat, a spectacle, with other
children in the like case, to the whole congregation, and I often
nearly fell down, overcome with drowsiness. My weakness much
troubled me, because, although it might not be a heinous sin, such
as bathing on Sunday, it showed that I was not one of God's
children, like Samuel, who ministered before the Lord girded with a
linen ephod. Bathing on Sunday, as the river was always before me,
was particularly prominent as a type of wickedness, and I read in
some book for children, by a certain divine named Todd, how a wicked
boy, bathing on the Sabbath, was drawn under a mill-wheel, was
drowned, and went to hell.
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