Arithmetic, by copying examples on birchbark, as he heard them given to a class of large boys at school; and he obtained the answer as soon as they, and sometimes sooner. At home, his father gave him more difficult problems, letting him study several days till he had solved them, rather than assist him. To this early discipline, he felt himself indebted for much of that patience and perseverance in investigation which characterized his after life. If he had fewer books to read, like other children of that generation, they were not mere tinctures or phantoms of knowledge, but, for the most part, solid and useful. And they were also better read, and often, from sheer necessity, re-read and pondered, until the facts and principles which they contained were digested, and incorporated into the mind's life and activities. In this way the thoughtful boy made his entrance early into the Mathematics, History, Philosophy and Christian Doctrine, not by forcing processes, but gladsomely, as into the familiar apartments of his own father's house.

The father intended him for a farmer, -to take the homestead and be the staff of his old age. But his mother, under the divine guidance, had other plans, in the unfolding of which, the father gradually gave way. The son, too, seems early to have leaned to his mother's side. He wished for a thorough education, when as yet there was no prospect of such a boon, and he had a thought not clearly defined, that he might,- perhaps an expectation that he should be, a minister. A sickness, occasioned by what we usually term an accident, but which was really a providence, was prolonged till the father's design respecting his son was weakened, - and the mother's had grown into sovereignty. By such means, God brought his purpose to the inception, and it was decided that Leonard should immediately begin the study of Latin, which he did with the parish minister. This was a determinative period, which gave direction to the whole course of his subsequent history.

His preparation for college was mostly a matter of self-culture. Three months were all the regular academical tuition his circumstances would allow. These were spent at Leicester, under the excellent training of Mr. Adams, afterwards professor of Mathematics in Dartmouth College.

He entered at Harvard in 1792. His college life drew him from the salutary influences of home, and brought him into new trials of his principles, and new temptations to swerve from them. It was, too, at the darkest period, morally, in the history of our country. The infidelity which had made France a seething caldron of malignant passions, had stretched across the ocean, and was settling thick as night on all the land. It entered the institutions of learning, and the lights of piety went out. During a part of young Woods' college course, the late Dr. John H. Church was the only professor of religion in the four classes. In Yale, the state of things was but little better. It was the fashion to laugh at Christianity, after the manner of Voltaire and Paine, and it was deemed a mark of superior intellect and wisdom to pity, or to scorn a believer in its doctrines. The discourses of Dr. Dwight arrested this evil in Yale College, though it continued in Harvard. He punctured the balloon on which the stripling philosophers had soared so high, and with the collapse, the theological æronauts suddenly descended to a sobriety in which they saw that it is the fool and not the wise man that says, "There is no God."

Mr. Woods was better prepared by his early religious training to withstand such pernicious influences, than most of his companions. His associations and his convictions were on the side of faith in the Christian Doctrines. He therefore repelled the open and gross assaults upon them, while in the subtler and more seductive forms of the Priestlian speculations, the poison took effect. He was attracted to this materialistic philosophy,