. 14.] A UTOBIOGRAPHY. 



lies high on the hills, between the West and East 

 Canada creeks, seven miles north of Little Falls. 

 I went there first in October, 1825, the date I fix by 

 that of the completion of the Erie Canal. For that 

 autumn, I think in November, I walked one after- 

 noon, along with some other students, down to Little 

 Falls to see there the arrival of the canal-boat which 

 bore the canal-commissioners, with the governor, De 

 Witt Clinton at their head, on their ceremonious voy- 

 age from Buffalo to New York city. It reached Little 

 Falls near sunset, and we walked to Fairfield that 

 evening. The reason for my being sent to Fairfield 

 Academy was that the principal of the academy was 

 Charles Avery, uncle of my companion from infancy, 

 Eli Avery, of our town, who died two years ago, who 

 had been educated by the help of Eli's father, Colonel 

 Avery, one of the owners of Paris furnace. Charles 

 Avery several years later took the professorship of 



quickly and easily would have leisure for some mischief, but he said, 

 " I always learned my lessons." He loved to recall the long rambles 

 through the woods on Saturday holidays, and how in early spring he 

 and his companions would climb to a lookout and see where columns 

 of smoke could be seen above the trees, and so aim for the spot where 

 they were making maple sugar. There they would beg a little syrup, 

 and, boiling it down over their own fire and cooling it on snow, make 

 a candy more delicious than any confectionery of after life. He re- 

 membered how he trained himself to know the trees by their bark as 

 he ran through the woods, without looking up at the leaves, having 

 then the keen power of observation though no especial interest in 

 botany. For, as he always said, his first fancy was for mineralogy 

 rather than for botany. 



And he told how when he was a medical student, as so many about 

 him were smoking, he tried it too ; it made him very sick at first, and 

 took him some time to get accustomed to it. At last, as he sat one 

 evening before the fire and smoked, he said to himself, " Really, I am 

 beginning to like it. It will become a habit ; I shall be dependent 

 upon it.'' And so he threw his cigar into the fire and gave up 

 smoking entirely. 



