Search -
My Schools and Schoolmasters, Or, the Story of My Education | by Hugh Miller
My Schools and Schoolmasters Or the Story of My Education by Hugh Miller Author:Hugh Miller General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1857 Original Publisher: Gould and Lincoln Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may 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 c... more »an select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER ll. " Tbree stormy nights and stormy days We tossed upon the raging mam; And long we strove our bark to save, But all our striving was in vain." Lowb. I Was born, the first child of this marriage, on the 10th day of October, 1802, in the low, long house built by my greatgrandfather, the buccaneer. My memory awoke early. I have recollections which date several months ere the completion of my third year; but, like those of the golden age of the world, they are chiefly of a mythologic character. I remember, for instance, getting out unobserved one day to my father's little garden, and seeing there a minute duckling covered with soft yellow hair, growing out of the soil by its feet, and beside it a plant that bore as its flowers a crop of little mussel shells of a deep red color. I know not what prodigy of the vegetable kingdom produced the little duckling ; but the plant with the shells must, I think, have been a scarlet runner, and the shells themselves the papilionaceous blossoms. I have a distinct -ecollection, too -- but it belongs to a later period -- of seeing ny ancestor, old John Feddes, the buccaneer, though he must -iave been dead at the time considerably more than half a century. I had learned to take an interest in his story, as preserved and told in the antique dwelling which he had. built more than a hundred years before. To forget a lova djsappointment, he had set out early in life for the Spanish Main, where, after giving and receiving some hard blows, he succeeded in filling a little bag with dollars and doubloons; and then coming ho...« less