How To Do It | Page 4

of that day have enough now.
But we were a set of young people, starting on a new church, which
had, I assure you, no dust in the pulpit-cushions. And almost all the
children were young, as you may suppose. The first meeting of the
Sunday school showed, I think, thirty-six children, and more of them
were under nine than over. They are all twenty-five years older now
than they were then. Well, we started without a library for the Sunday
school. But in a corner of my study Jo Matthews and I put up some
three-cornered shelves, on which I kept about a hundred books such as
children like, and young people who are no longer children; and then,
as I sat reading, writing, or stood fussing over my fuchsias or labelling
the mineralogical specimens, there would come in one or another nice
girl or boy, to borrow a "Rollo" or a "Franconia," or to see if Ellen
Liston had returned "Amy Herbert." And so we got very good chances
to find each other out. It is not a bad plan for a young minister, if he
really want to know what the young folk of his parish are. I know it
was then and there that I conceived the plan of writing "Margaret
Percival in America" as a sequel to Miss Sewell's "Margaret Percival,"
and that I wrote my half of that history.
The Worcester Sunday school grew beyond thirty-six scholars; and I
have since had to do with two other Sunday schools, where, though the
children did not know it, I felt as young as the youngest of them all.
And in that sort of life you get chances to come at nice boys and nice
girls which most people in the world do not have.
And the last of all the congresses of young people which I will name,
where I have found my favorites, shall be the vacation
congresses,--when people from all the corners of the world meet at

some country hotel, and wonder who the others are the first night, and,
after a month, wonder again how they ever lived without knowing each
other as brothers and sisters. I never had a nicer time than that day
when we celebrated Arthur's birthday by going up to Greely's Pond.
"Could Amelia walk so far? She only eight years old, and it was the
whole of five miles by a wood-road, and five miles to come back
again." Yes, Amelia was certain she could. Then, "whether Arthur
could walk so far, he being nine." Why, of course he could if Amelia
could. So eight-year-old, nine-year-old, ten-year-old, eleven-year-old,
and all the rest of the ages,--we tramped off together, and we stumbled
over the stumps, and waded through the mud, and tripped lightly, like
Somnambula in the opera, over the log bridges, which were single logs
and nothing more, and came successfully to Greely's Pond,--beautiful
lake of Egeria that it is, hidden from envious and lazy men by forest
and rock and mountain. And the children of fifty years old and less
pulled off shoes and stockings to wade in it; and we caught in tin mugs
little seedling trouts not so long as that word "seedling" is on the page,
and saw them swim in the mugs and set them free again; and we ate the
lunches with appetites as of Arcadia; and we stumped happily home
again, and found, as we went home, all the sketch-books and bait-boxes
and neckties which we had lost as we went up. On a day like that you
get intimate, if you were not intimate before.
O dear! don't you wish you were at Waterville now?
Now, if you please, my dear Fanchon, we will not go any further into
the places where I got acquainted with the heroes and heroines of this
book. Allow, of those mentioned here, four to the Latin school, five to
the Unity Sunday school, six to the South Congregational, seven to
vacation acquaintance, credit me with nine children of my own and ten
brothers and sisters, and you will find no difficulty in selecting who of
these are which of those, if you have ever studied the science of
"Indeterminate Analysis" in Professor Smythe's Algebra.
"Dear Mr. Hale, you are making fun of us. We never know when you
are in earnest."
Do not be in the least afraid, dear Florence. Remember that a central
rule for comfort in life is this, "Nobody was ever written down an ass,
except by himself."
Now I will tell you how and when the particular thirty-four names

above happened to come together.
We were, a few of us, staying at the White Mountains. I think no New
England summer is quite perfect unless you stay at least a day