202 NATHANIEL SOUTHGATE SHALER 



lander, I felt as if I were in an enemy's country and had to go 

 carefully. This was in part because my wanderings were usually 

 on Sunday with a deep net, a fisherman's basket, and a botanical 

 box that showed that I was on some kind of diversion. On al- 

 most the first of my rambles, in what is now called the Middlesex 

 Fells, I encountered on a wood road a sturdy deacon, who asked 

 the business which took me abroad on the Sabbath. On being 

 told I was going to church, he asked where, and when I replied 

 that it was under the great roof of the sky where I was sure of 

 the Lord's presence, he became angry and undertook to arrest 

 me. Not until I convinced him that his Sunday clothes would 

 soon be in the roadside ditch, did he give over this notion. I 

 tried to make the fuming heathen see that he was the Sabbath- 

 breaker; asked him to sit down and talk the matter out; but 

 after the manner of his kind, he was not open to argument and 

 went his way promising me, from the distance, full share of 

 affliction in this world and the next. This deacon long stayed 

 with me for a fair sample of the Puritan, and helped greatly to 

 intensify my dislike, I may say my abhorrence, of Christianity. 

 It was years after, before I came to see that he and his like 

 belong to a group marvellously escaped from the influence of 

 Jesus, by holding to the primitive brutal motives of man which 

 it was the place of the Master to destroy. The fact that I could 

 not get a "whack" with any I encountered on my walks, except 

 with the evident pagans, did much to hinder my understanding 

 of what religion means. 



In my student days and long afterward, in Somerville, near 

 the Mystic River, there stood the ruined masonry of a Roman 

 Catholic convent, which had been burned by a Protestant mob 

 in the early part of the last century, the provocation being, as 

 I have understood, the idle rumor that a girl was imprisoned 

 there. Although I was brought up in the English Church, it 

 was in a tolerant atmosphere, where the Romanists were looked 

 upon good-naturedly, as people who were not so very far off 

 from ourselves. My grandfather Southgate, as before noted, 



