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Accordingly, I pursued a rather carefully ordered course. At the age of fourteen I had taken very seriously my confirmation in the Thirty-ninth Street Temple, and now I formed the habit of visiting churches of many denominations and making abstracts of the sermons that I heard delivered by Henry Ward Beecher, Henry W. Bellows, Rabbi Einhorn, Richard S. Storrs, T. De Witt Talmage, and Dr. Alger, and many others of the famous pulpit-orators who enriched the intellectual life of New York. It was the era when Emerson led American thought, and I profited by passing my impressionable years in that period whose daily press was edited by such men as Horace Greeley, William Cullen Bryant, Charles A. Dana, Henry T. Raymond, and Lawrence Godkin.

There lived with us a hunchbacked Quaker doctor, Samuel S. Whitall, a beautiful character, softened instead of embittered by his affliction, the physician at the coloured hospital, who gave half his time to charitable work among the poor. I frequently opened the door for his patients and ran his errands, and we became friends. I remember his long, religious talks, and how deeply I was impressed by Penn’s “No Cross, No Crown,” a copy of which he gave me. Largely because of it I composed twenty-four rules of action, tabulating virtues that I wished to acquire and vices that I must avoid. I even made a chart of these maxims, and every night marked against myself whatever breaches of them I had been guilty of. Looking over this record for February and March of 1872, I find that I charged myself with dereliction in not heeding my self-imposed admonitions against indulgence in sweets, departures from strict veracity, too much talking, extravagance, idleness, and vanity—a heavy indictment!