piety and benevolence, discharged with exemplary affection her duties towards him and her other children, notwithstanding a second marriage, this circumstance cut him off from all those advantages which the moral education received in a well-regulated family under the paternal roof confers. Owing in a great measure to the political condition of the country, but principally, perhaps, to the restlessness of his own character, his youthful studies were irregular and ill-directed. He frequently changed his inclinations in the choice of a profession. At one time the law, at another the career of a missionary among the Indians, captivated his fancy. When both these schemes of life had been, one after the other, abandoned, his imagination appears to have dwelt with complacency for a moment on the peaceful studies and noiseless, though important, avocations of a country clergyman.
The completion of the slender education which he received was effected at Dartmouth College, an institution established by the Rev. Dr. Wheelock, in the back woods, with the benevolent design of scattering the seeds of religion and civilization among the Indian nations. Here Ledyard, whose mind was as impatient of the salutary restraints of discipline as that of any savage upon earth, exhibited unequivocal tokens of those locomotive propensities which afterward goaded him into rather than directed him in his romantic but almost aimless wanderings over the greater part of the habitable world. For ordinary studies he had evidently no aptitude. He read, indeed, but it was such reading as beguiled away the time, and nourished the fantastic vagaries of his imagination, without much enlarging his mind, or knitting his character into firmness or consistency. In many respects he scarcely yielded to the knight of La Mancha. What does the reader think he carried with him to college, whither he was proceeding for the purpose of fitting himself for spreading the
