when motherhood in honorable wedlock, with all women, was a glory. Her womanly instincts were too strong, and her conscience too quick, to take my life before I was born. She was willing to reach out into the dark and struggle with God for a life.

I

My name was put on me next morning. was named after my grandfathers on both sides. One was a Yankee, who came to Indiana by an Indian trail; and the other was a Scotchman, who had called his braes on the Highlands. The fact that I received my name so soon means that I was regarded only with the ordinary affection of matter-of-fact parents. They were not silly over me; to which, if they had been inclined, they had no time. The English language is hardly equal to the naming of the most ordinary baby in these times. Parents put it

now.

off for months for fear some mistake will be made. Then there are so many silly names Reuben Rodney-there is some strength in that. A name is either a help or a hindrance to character. It does not make or break, but it helps or hinders. Great men have been sent to the limbo of oblivion, simply because the public could never learn their names. If there be as much expression and meaning in the higher harmonies as the musicians say, there must be

I

something in the vocal effects of a name. was always satisfied with my name. It was a little too heavy for the first five years; but after that it became more and more serviceable. Any child of which anything is expected ought to have a full-grown name. It has a right to this, and it is grievously sinned against if it does not get it.

I was not rocked in a sugar-trough. I was pinned up in a pillow, and laid in the rockingchair. And this very thing came very near being the end of me. Uncle Linus Hickum came over one day, and being near-sighted he was about to take my chair; when mother threw a spoon at him, and Nancy Perkins yanked him into the corner so vigorously that he stepped on the side of the frying pan, and the handle flew up and whacked him on the head. Uncle Linus did not understand this, and he did not wait for an explanation. He went out of the house fighting mad. He regarded it as a premeditated and unprovoked attack on him. When there are blind people in the neighborhood, never put the baby in the rocking-chair.

When I was three years old I was full size, and had come to dexterous use of my legs and hands and tongue. My senses were all alert, and I received many strange and curious impres

sions. As all children do, I lived in a realistic world. What succession of unreal appearances! What fascination by the incomprehensible! What strange impressions were made by the powerful and vast forces in both nature and life! What a time for spontaneous belief! I was not able to veil my thoughts from the barnyard animals. They would interpret my purposes and thwart my plans. There was one cow in the wood lot whose features were very much like Nancy Perkins's, and this cow could tell what I was thinking about whenever she saw me. Many a time I have kept out of her sight to keep her from knowing what I intended to do. One day I found the forearm, carpal, metacarpal, and phalanges bones of a human skeleton in a box under the edge of the bed. This, I learned afterward, was the property of an uncle, who was then a student of medicine. These bones attracted me; but I could hold them but a minute till the fingers would begin to move, and they would keep it up till I would lay them down. A score of times I tried this, and with no more success at the last than the first. I saw the movement of those fingers as if living, plainly as I ever saw anything.

One evening, as the sun had gone behind the trees in the west, I was sitting on father's

knee in the doorway. In those cabin times it was a common thing to sit in the door, and look out on the beauty of nature at nightfall. To-day people shut out nature, and feast on works of art on the inside. There is not much inside beauty in a cabin, but nature had as many charms for the soul then as now. Along the covert of the bushes and the pasture-fence our chickens were feeding, and a flock of crows were there, hopping on the ground and from stake to stake.

Father said: "Look there, Rodney; our chickens are turning to crows."

So it was then to me. One after another the chickens would fly a few feet from the ground, turn black and fly away. Nothing clearer as a matter of sensuous evidence ever appeared to me.

I attributed volition to the bending to and fro of the trees in the wind. I endowed all nature, not only with life, but with feeling and thought and purpose. I did this without knowing what I was doing. I did not know at all that I was separate and distinct from the stones and birds and trees. It was a mythological age to me. I was a small-sized idolater. Bishop Taylor says that the children of Africa are not born heathen. Children are born that in America.

Civilization is not hereditary with the in

dividual.

Every Saxon scion is born a raw heathen. He is a little ignoramus, with a few instincts and nerve-centers, and with an original equipment of truth nothing in advance of the pickaninnies of Africa. His first look around the room is a universe of exploration. He has intimations of spiritual truth, but they do not come to consciousness straightway. The things his senses take in, and the meanings he first gets, are the prophecies of truth farther ahead. His first impressions of the world are largely misleading. The views of a child are taken as from a telescope with an unsettled surface ground, and he gets a blurred image. But the child as a knowledge-gatherer has almost infinite possibilities. We are great blunderers here. We grope our way through mazes of phenomena from which no absolute truth can be taken, because absolute truth is never known except by authority, or through knowledge of all relationships. We live in a shadow-land. We see parts of nature's meaning. We are never more than a handbreadth from intolerable mystery. But we grow. We feed on the truth. It is the essence of our immortality. The future is an open highway.