Note 12 — Chapter I · AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 1810-1843.

Dr. Gray visited Fairfield again in the summer of 1860 or 1861. He pointed out his old room, and told about some of the pranks he and his room-mate Eli Avery had played there as boys, especially once when they barred their room, escaped through the window by clambering down a rope, and then enjoyed the efforts of the master to break the door down. Oddly enough there was then a fresh panel in the door, as if a later generation had tried the same trick. There were a great many stories told of his exploits as a boy. But he said everything had been fathered upon him, and that few were really true. He was no doubt restless and active, and learning quickly and easily would have leisure for some mischief, but he said, “I always learned my lessons.” He loved to recall the long rambles through the woods on Saturday holidays, and how in early spring he and his companions would climb to a lookout and see where columns of smoke could be seen above the trees, and so aim for the spot where they were making maple sugar. There they would beg a little syrup, and, boiling it down over their own fire and cooling it on snow, make a candy more delicious than any confectionery of after life. He remembered how he trained himself to know the trees by their bark as he ran through the woods, without looking up at the leaves, having then the keen power of observation though no especial interest in botany. For, as he always said, his first fancy was for mineralogy rather than for botany.

And he told how when he was a medical student, as so many about him were smoking, he tried it too; it made him very sick at first, and took him some time to get accustomed to it. At last, as he sat one evening before the fire and smoked, he said to himself, “Really, I am beginning to like it. It will become a habit; I shall be dependent upon it.” And so he threw his cigar into the fire and gave up smoking entirely.