friend tempted him. He knew nothing of games or sports; he had few or no companions, but, "to be sent off through the wilderness alone to very considerable distances was particularly his delight. . . . By the time he was twelve years old he was sent off more than a hundred miles with companies of cattle." So his soul grew apart and alone and yet untrammeled and unconfined, knowing all the depths of secret self-abasement, and the heights of confident self-will. With others he was painfully diffident and bashful, and little sins that smaller souls would laugh at and forget loomed large and awful to his heart-searching vision. John had "a very bad foolish habit. . . . I mean telling lies, generally to screen himself from blame or from punishment," because "he could not well endure to be reproached and I now think had he been oftener encouraged to be entirely frank . . . he would not have been so often guilty of this fault, nor have been (in after life) obliged to struggle so long with so mean a habit."
Such a nature was in its very essence religious, even mystical, but never superstitious nor blindly trustful in half-known creeds and formulas. His family was not rigidly Puritan in its thought and discipline but had rather fallen into the mild heathenism of the hard-working frontier until just before John's birth. Then, his father relates in quaint Calvinistic patois: "I lived at home in 1782; this was a memorable year, as there was a great revival of religion in the town of Canton. My mother and
