66 "B CHAPTER I HOME AND SCHOOL DAYS E ADMONISHED: of making many books there is no need," was the rendering once made in church of that familiar verse of Ecclesiastes by a clumsy reader of the Scriptures. It is no doubt implied in the original caution “of making many books there is no end." The misreading only pointed the moral of the fact. Book making is boundless. Therefore go slowly in thinking there is any need of trying to make another. And this caveat is especially stern against vain imaginings that the story of an ordinary life time is of reading interest to the public. Autobiographies like autographs only have general values when they underwrite figures that pass current like checks honored "on the street." In wholesome regard for all which the present writer simply proposes to sketch some memories of Days of My Age in response to a wish of his children. And if he runs on into chapters cumbered as well as numbered with capital I's, it will be with the restraining influence that they knew closest of all what a very human document it must be if the truth is told. The value of such intimate qualifications for censorship ought at any rate to serve somewhat as a snuffer on any rash candling of egotism. One small daughter for example in the earlier years of my ministry when walking to church with me a Sunday morning roused me from a sermonizing reverie by asking in her child naïveté, "Papa, are you going to say anything I can understand this morning?" As they have ever brought their mother and father the Psalmist's family symmetry of a fivefold Beatitude of the "quiver full"— "happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them”and Oriental scholars tell us that the quiver of old when full held just five-it is well to remember that such arrows may have silent shafts for any parental flights of spread-eagleism! In the hope then for due circumspection to avoid romancing before my own dearest and closest ones as the "reading circle" for whom these pages are primarily penned I note the first day of my age as Saturday, June 9, 1849, the date of my birth in Lloyd, Ulster County, New York. My father was Charles Hubert Nichols and my mother was Margaret Emilia (Grant) Nichols. On the Nichols side I have the carefully prepared manuscript of my father tracing the line from son to father back to Francis Nichols, one of the original proprietors and settlers of Stratford, Connecticut, in 1639, whose house lot is charted among those of the original seventeen families on the first map of Stratford Village in 1639, making my generation the ninth in America and that of my present fourteen grandchildren the eleventh American generation. Genealogists of the family have found a lineage claiming kinship with Sir Richard Nichols, who captured and named New York, to whom I have made more extended reference in my World Circuit Saunterings, pp. 127, 8. Suffice it to say that both there and in America the name in its direct line and in its intermarriages has been borne by its share of members of distinction and of sturdy, if not eminent New England and other American citizenship and my children and grandchildren will appreciate that the heritage of a good American name coming down from the beginnings of New England and Americanized by ten generations and through nearly three hundred years is a legacy in itself, even though not affluent with great riches. My father was the son of Josiah Morse Nichols and Delilah (Duncombe) Nichols, who were married by the Rev. Ashbel Baldwin March 27, 1814. Mr. Baldwin was then the clergyman at Trumbull, Conn., and was one of four ordained by Bishop Seabury at the first ordination held by a bishop of our church in America August 3, 1785, and there is a tradition that he was the first of the four to receive the laying on of hands. The names Morse and Duncombe and others such as Beardsley, Curtis, |