68 NATHANIEL SOUTHGATE SEALER 



quality as among the most enlarging that came to me in my 

 youth. 



In 1854, when a lad of thirteen, I made with my father a 

 journey to Massachusetts and Long Island, by railway to 

 Cleveland, thence by steamer to Buffalo, and then on again by 

 railway. To this day the sense of the breadth of the world which 

 came with this seeing stays with me. Vast indeed was the 

 impression afforded by the sky-line of water on Lake Erie. I 

 knew that the northern shore lay not far beyond sight, yet the 

 oceanic effect, the greatest the world has to give those who are 

 from the depths of the land, entered my soul ; no others of the 

 manifold impressions I have had from the seas have been thus 

 lasting. I must have been in a vivid state on this journey, for all 

 the impressions of it remain startlingly clear. The wide stretches 

 of the landscape and the peculiar waltzing effect which rapid 

 motion gives to its features ; above all, the sight of the first con- 

 siderable hills, the glimpse of the far-off Catskills, and then the 

 sight of Greylock as we neared Pittsfield, stay printed on my 

 mind. Most interesting was the curiously strong sense that the 

 land was not like what I had before known. This impression 

 recurred every time I returned in after years to Massachusetts, 

 though it was not long before I came to perceive that the mean- 

 ing of this strangeness was that the surface of the ground in this 

 part of the world had been shaped by glacial action, while the 

 fields of my youth bore the stamp of free water. 



Our first stopping-place was Lancaster, Massachusetts. Of 

 my experience there at the home of my great-aunt Abigail 

 Stilwell I have already told. Thence we went to Boston, where 

 my father had many college friends, who thronged about him ; 

 he was evidently dear to them. Now for the first time I saw 

 that the man of forty years had been a boy. For the first time 

 in my life I heard him called by his given name, for my mother 

 always addressed him as "Doctor." My surprise, mingled with 

 a certain indignation at the freedom of these schoolmates with 

 my father, shows clearly that he was a strangely withdrawn man. 



