56 Frederick Law Olmsted 



and then told me that he had helped his father to plant the 

 trees, describing how small they were at the time. I wanted 

 my father to let me help him plant trees and he did, but they 

 were not placed with sufficient forecast and have since all 

 been cut down. But great-grandfather's trees stand yet and 

 the hang-birds yet have their home in them. 



Then I Hved for a few months chiefly with my grand- 

 mother, going irregularly to a village school, but being edu- 

 cated more I think through some old novels, plays and books 

 of travels that I found in a sea chest in her garret. I actually 

 read at this time much of Zimmerman on Solitude, Sterne's 

 Sentimental Journey and the Vicar of Wakefield. I have the 

 same volumes now, and I never have such a puzzling sense 

 of double Hfe as when I see some of Coleman's plays on the 

 stage. 



I suppose these readings developed the talent which I 

 must have temporarily possessed two or three years later, 

 when I could hire other boys to do my chores by telling them 

 stories, — no doubt but partially of my own invention. 



Then I spent nearly five years, vacations excepted, in the 

 home of a minister who undertook, with God's help, to bring 

 up four select pupils in the fear of the Lord, making no dis- 

 tinction between them and his own children. For their ac- 

 commodation he had bought and moved a small, old country 

 store alongside the parsonage proper, in the cellar of which he 

 stowed cabbages and roots, on the ground floor had a work- 

 shop and harness room, and in the second story the boys' 

 beds, desks and benches. 



The clapboards were warped and shackling and the win- 

 ter pressed us hard. The heating apparatus was a sheet-iron 

 stove, if I am not mistaken made by the parson himself. 

 The parson's salary was nominally $500 a year but the people 

 being poor and money scarce he took much of it in "pro- 

 duce" — firewood, for instance, which was invariably de- 

 livered when the sledding was good and mostly in logs. As 

 soon as winter came, the duty was put on me to keep up the 



