Benjamnin F. Butler, Butler's Book: Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benjamin Butler

“Parse lamb,” said the master to the pupil who stood at the head of the class. He tried.

“Wrong; next.” He tried.

“Next.” He tried, and so down through the class, some eight in all. Then came my turn.

I said: “Lamb is a noun in the objective case and governed by dooms.”

“How do you know that?” said the master.

“Because I construe the paragraph ‘ Thy riot dooms the lamb to bleed to-day; had he thy reason, etc.’ ”

“Right,” said the master; “take the head of the class.”

I did so; and it was the proudest event of my life. A consultation was held by all those who had a right to be consulted, and it was decided that I should be sent to Exeter to be fitted for college, with the hope that a free scholarship might be found for me. I continued my studies, and late in the following autumn I went to Exeter. Here I commenced the study of Latin, and soon afterwards that of Greek. I must say, truthfully, that my learning at Exeter did not amount to much. To be sure, I acquired the Latin grammar with a certainty of memory that was excelled only by my uncertainty as to the meanings of the rules it contained. My learning was nothing but memorizing. It was the same in the study of Greek. I was far too young to appreciate the beauties of the “Iliad,” but I was reasonably well taught in the conjugation of Greek verbs.

I attended the Unitarian Church, as the rules of the school required. Boy like, I was confused by the new doctrine of one God and the Son of Man, as opposed to the doctrine of the triune God,--Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. I had been taught the latter, and I could not permit myself to have any doubts concerning it.

In 1825, there was springing up on Pawtucket Falls of the Merrimack River, the second great manufacturing town in Massachusetts, Waltham on the Charles being the first. This town, afterwards Lowell, was then known as East Chelmsford. It had a growth unexampled in those days, and almost equalling the mushroom growth of towns in some of the western States at the present day. The constitutional convention of 1820, by a new section, made cities possible in Massachusetts, fixing the limit of population at which any town could become a city at twelve thousand. This