14 Life of Count Rumford. 



Count that any wrong had been done him in his child- 

 hood by his grandfather's unequal distribution of his 

 estate, their informant failed to explain to them the dif- 

 ferent usage which prevailed in New England from that 

 followed in Europe in the partition of property on the 

 decease of the head of a family. 



The Rev. Samuel Sewall, the faithful historian of the 

 town of Woburn, coming of a family which has given 

 three chief-justices to Massachusetts, might well be 

 supposed to hold the laws of his native State in reverent 

 regard. His impartiality, therefore, is to be recognized 

 in the fidelity with which he represents the shortcom- 

 ings of that town, in some periods of its history, in 

 evading the statutes which so carefully provided for the 

 interests of a common-school education for all children. 

 But at the time in which Benjamin Thompson was in 

 his early pupilage, the town was particularly favored in 

 having for a village school-teacher an accomplished and 

 faithful man, Mr. John Fowle, a graduate of Harvard 

 College in 1747. It is evident from the handwriting 

 of Thompson when he was only thirteen years of age, 

 from the spelling and the almost faultless grammatical 

 expressions in his letters and compositions before he 

 had reached manhood, and from his skill in accounts, 

 that he had not only had remarkable native powers, but 

 that he had also been the subject of careful and thorough 

 training. His chirography was clear, strong, and ele- 

 gant, and it remained the same through his life. Nor 

 was his style one whit inferior in terseness, exactness, 

 and simplicity to that of Franklin. The high authority 

 of Mr. George B. Emerson has been given for the asser- 

 tion, that, under the mode of instruction through which 

 young Thompson and his contemporaries enjoyed the 



