4 8 Frederick Law Olmsted 



I was placed successively in charge of six ministers. 

 That this was not a choice of schoolmasters appears from 

 the fact that while living with three of them I was, with my 

 father's knowledge, sent out by them to day schools twice 

 to the common school and that only one himself gave me 

 regular instruction. In every case, too, I was for the most 

 part turned over for what is commonly called religious in- 

 struction to Sunday school teachers, that is to say, vain, 

 ignorant and conceited big boys and girls, parrots or quacks 

 at the business. 



The first of these ministers, who became my father by 

 deputy when I was but six years old, was the pastor of a 

 thoroughly rural parish. The surface of the country was 

 rugged, the soil, except in small patches, poor; the farms 

 consequently large and the settlement scattered ; there was 

 one little general store at which the weekly mail was dis- 

 tributed ; there was no public house, but near the meeting- 

 house some cabins had been built with fireplaces made of 

 field stone in which families who came from far could get 

 warm and eat their snack between the Sunday services. (I 

 think Sunday was then called Sunday and that the fashion 

 of calling it Sabbath came in afterwards or had not yet 

 reached this place.) 



The accumulation of results of labor in several generations 

 was chiefly conspicuous in the stone walls which divided the 

 fields. 



I suppose that the large family in which I lived, enjoyed 

 more luxury than any other, but I doubt if, one year with 

 another, four hundred dollars in money passed its hands. 

 Every household, however, was self-supporting and none so 

 needy that it would not resent an offer of gratuitous assist- 

 ance unless it were in such neighborly kindness as the poorest 

 might offer the richest. There was a single family of vaga- 

 bond habits who sometimes came to the store and bartered 

 small peltry chiefly for tobacco and rum, and once when they 

 had done so betook themselves to a Sunday house and shut 



