A New England Childhood Author:Margaret Fuller General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1916 Original Publisher: Little, Brown Description: "This is a true story of a little boy who grew to be a notable man -- Edmund Clarence Stedman."--Foreword. Subjects: New England Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there m... more »ay be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: II The Undiscovered Country By the time that Edmund came to live in the brick house, he was considered old enough to take a constitutional by himself, and he used to trudge down the street to the Reverend Horace Bushnell's sanctuary and hold forth in the portico after the fashion of that worthy. But it was safe at home that he practised his untried powers unabashed, and it was after a year's practice that his mother's sister, his Aunt Melissa, found him on the floor, seated on his cousin's head, and droning in his babyhood treble a forceful sequence of ohs and ahs. "Land alive! Edmund, what are you doing?" cried the astonished lady. "Pweaching," lisped the nigh three-year-old, and straightened manlike to feel the pull of his suspenders. "But you are sitting on your cousin's head; he is black in the face." "I'm Weverend Bushnell, and I want him to listen." "But Doctor Bushnell never sits on your father's head, or on your head, or on mine, when he wants us to listen." Edmund's face grew thoughtful. "But you can't get away till he's through," he replied, after weighing the question. That argument was not to be gainsaid. Aunt Melissa seized the melancholy congregation by the sleeve and with a jerk landed him blubbering on his feet. "Why do you let little Edmund sit on you, -- a great boy like you, three times his size and half again his age? Look at him; he's only a weanling !" The congregation, spying down from the superio...« less