There was not a single railway in the whole State.

When I went away to school in New Jersey, at the age of thirteen, the tedious journey by the stagecoach required three days and two nights; every letter from home cost eighteen cents for postage; and the youngsters pored over Webster's spelling-books and Morse's geography by tallow candles; for no gas lamps had been dreamed of and the wood fires were covered, in most houses, by nine o'clock on a winter evening.

There was plain living then, but not a little high thinking.

If books were not so superabundant as in these days, they were more thoroughly appreciated and digested.
My father, who was just winning a brilliant position at the Cayuga County Bar, died in June, 1826, at the early age of twenty-eight, when I was but four and one-half years old.

The only distinct recollections that I have of him are his leading me to school in the morning, and that he once punished me for using a profane word that I had heard from some rough boys.