Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II A Friend at Andover, Mass.?Hezekiah Butterworth?A Few of my Own Folks?Professor Putnam of Dartmouth?One Year at Packer Institute, Brooklyn?Beecher’s Face in Prayer?The Poet Saxe as I Saw him?Offered the Use of a Rare Library?Miss Edna Dean Proctor?New Stories of Greeley?Experiences at St. Louis. Next a few months at Andover for music lessons ?piano and organ. A valuable friend was found in Miss Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, who had just published her Gates Ajar. She invited me to her study and wanted to know what I meant to accomplish in life and urged me to write.
I have so much work called for now that I cannot keep up my contributions to The Youth’s Companion. I want you to have my place there. What would you like to write about?
Don’t know.
Haven’t you anything at home to describe.
No.
Any pets?
Why I have a homely, ordinary dog, but he knows a lot. And so I was roused to try Our Rab and His Friends, which was kindly mailed by Miss Phelps to Mr. Ford, the editor, with a wish that he accept the little story, which he did, sending a welcome check and asking for more contributions. I kept a place there for several years. In Miss Phelps’s case, one must believe in heredity and partly in Huxley’s statement that we are automata propelled by our ancestors. Her grandfather, Moses Stuart, was Professor of Sacred Literature, at Andover, a teacher of Greek and Latin, and a believer in that stern school of theology and teleology. It was owing perhaps to a combination of severity in climatic and in intellectual environment that New England developed an austere type of scholars and theologians. Their mental vision was focused on things remote in time and supernatural in quality, so much so that they often overlooked the simple and natural ex…