Sport
as a pursuit was unknown. Boat-racing came after 1850. For
horse-racing, only the trotting-course existed. Of all pleasures,
winter sleighing was still the gayest and most popular. From none
of these amusements could the boy learn anything likely to be of
use to him in the world. Books remained as in the eighteenth
century, the source of life, and as they came out -- Thackeray,
Dickens, Bulwer, Tennyson, Macaulay, Carlyle, and the rest --
they were devoured; but as far as happiness went, the happiest
hours of the boy's education were passed in summer lying on a
musty heap of Congressional Documents in the old farmhouse at
Quincy, reading "Quentin Durward," "Ivanhoe," and " The
Talisman," and raiding the garden at intervals for peaches and
pears. On the whole he learned most then.
CHAPTER III
WASHINGTON (1850-1854)
EXCEPT for politics, Mount Vernon Street had the merit of
leaving the boy-mind supple, free to turn with the world, and if
one learned next to nothing, the little one did learn needed not
to be unlearned. The surface was ready to take any form that
education should cut into it, though Boston, with singular
foresight, rejected the old designs. What sort of education was
stamped elsewhere, a Bostonian had no idea, but he escaped the
evils of other standards by having no standard at all; and what
was true of school was true of society.
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