OLD HOMESTEAD 



hear, whether in a class or not. Of course, when we boys had 

 grown to a size that we dared absent ourselves at noon and go 

 down in the gulf for swimming and gathering wintergreens, it 

 was not so hard. 



Some very famous preachers came occasionally to give us 

 one of their old sermons with innumerable heads, written when 

 they were at college. Father Speer, of Rodman, and Elder 

 Walker, of Adams, are two whom I remember especially well, 

 because they were white-haired, kind old gentlemen who fre- 

 quently visited at our house and seldom mentioned hell a 



place very popular with clergymen and many others in those 

 days, but feared and dreaded by children and others who were 

 unable to understand the philosophy of it. 



In this old church some very famous anti-slavery speakers 

 were also heard — Ward, Logan and others that I cannot now 

 remember. Father was a strong anti-slavery man from the 

 earliest days of the agitation, and was ready at any and all times 

 to discuss the subject with any one who desired. These discus- 

 sions were sometimes quite exciting, for it was a political ques- 

 tion then as well as a moral one, and very good neighbors and 

 close friends for the time being became bitter enemies, while 

 they angrily argued the right and wrong of the institution. 



Father believed that continued agitation of the matter would 

 finally bring about the desired reform. He did not expect to 

 see the great crime of slavery, against which he prayed every 

 morning for three hundred and sixty-live days in every year, for 

 over fifty years, abolished, but often said that if I lived to be his 

 age I might see a change in public sentiment on the question 

 which would lead to abolition or emancipation. Yet he did live 

 two full decades after the evil which he had fought for half a 

 century had been wiped out in blood. 



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