EARLY IMPEESSIONS-1832-1851 517 



one of my amusements, on returning home, was conduct 

 ing a sort of service, on my own account, with those of the 

 household who were willing to take part in it ; and, from 

 some traditions preserved in the family regarding my 

 utterances on such occasions, a droll sort of service it 

 must have been. 



In my seventh year the family removed to Syracuse, 

 the &quot;Central City&quot; of the State, already beginning a 

 wonderful career, although at that time of less than six 

 thousand inhabitants. My experience in the new city 

 was prefaced by an excursion, with my father and mother 

 and younger brother, to Buffalo and Niagara; and as 

 the railways through central New York were then unfin 

 ished, and, indeed, but few of them begun, we made the 

 journey almost entirely on a canal-packet. Perhaps my 

 most vivid remembrance of this voyage is that of the 

 fervid prayers I then put up against shipwreck. 



At Syracuse was a much larger and more influential 

 Protestant Episcopal church than that which we had 

 left, next, indeed, in importance to the Presbyterian 

 body. That church St. Paul s has since become the 

 mother of a large number of others, and has been made 

 the cathedral of a new diocese. In this my father, by vir 

 tue of his vigor in everything he undertook, was soon made 

 a vestryman, and finally senior warden; and, the rector- 

 ate happening to fall vacant, he recommended for the 

 place our former clergyman, Henry Gregory. He came, 

 and his work in the new place was soon even more effec 

 tive than in the old. 



His first influence made me a most determined little 

 bigot, and I remember well my battles in behalf of high- 

 church ideas with various Presbyterian boys, and espe 

 cially with the son of the Presbyterian pastor. In those 

 days went on a famous controversy provoked by a 

 speech at a New England dinner in the city of New York 

 which had set by the ears two eminent divines the Eev. 

 Dr. Wainwright, Episcopalian, and the Kev. Dr. Potts, 

 Presbyterian. Dr. Potts had insisted that the Puritans 



