Excerpt from A New England Boyhood and Other Bits of Autobiography It seems to me almost by accident that I have ever written the pages of autobiography which the reader will find in this volume. He will see that they have been gathered from many different sources; they have been written under various conditions for different classes of readers, and they make no pretence, therefore, at unity of method or literary style. But I do not like to leave the sketch of "Boyhood" which was published under the title of "A New England Boyhood," as if my life ended when I was seventeen years old. That sketch, as the reader will see, was written for the Atlantic Monthly, at request of its editor Mr. Scudder, to be, in its way, a companion for the admirable study called "A New England Girlhood," by my charming kinswoman Miss Lucy Larcom. It ends with the day when I took my first degree at Harvard College. Before and after it was written, I had furnished one and another account of experiences in my life, at the request of one or another editor, or other friends. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.