n itself. The knowledge gained is not always classic, nor
even polite, but it is all a part of the great, seething game of life.
Henry Ward Beecher was not an educated man in the usual sense of the
word. At school he carved his desk, made faces at the girls, and kept
the place in a turmoil generally: doing the wrong thing, just like many
another bumpkin. At home he carried in the wood, picked up chips, worked
in the garden in Summer, and shoveled out the walks in Winter. He knew
when the dishwater was worth saving to mix up with meal for the
chickens, and when it should be put on the asparagus-bed or the
rosebushes. He could make a lye-leach, knew that it was lucky to set
hens on thirteen eggs, realized that hens' eggs hatched in three weeks,
and ducks' in four. He knew when the berries ripened, where the crows
nested, and could find the bee-trees by watching the flight of the bees
after they had gotten their fill on the basswood-blossoms. He knew all
the birds that sang in the branches--could tell what birds migrated and
what not--was acquainted with the flowers and weeds and fungi--knew
where the rabbits burrowed--could pick the milkweed that would cure
warts, and tell the points of the compass by examining the bark of the
trees. He was on familiar terms with all the ragamuffins in the village,
and regarded the man who kept the livery-stable as the wisest person in
New England, and the stage-driver as the wittiest.

Lyman Beecher was a graduate of Yale, and Henry Ward would have been,
had he been able to pass the preparatory examinations. But he couldn't,
and finally he was bundled off to Amherst, very much as we now send boys
to a business college when they get plucked at the high school. But it
matters little--give the boys time--some of them ripen slowly, and
others there be who know more at sixteen than they will ever know again,
like street gamins with the wit of debauchees, rareripes at ten, and
rotten at the core. "Delay adolescence," wrote Doctor Charcot to an
anxious mother; "delay adolescence, and you bank energy until it is
needed. If your boy is stupid at fourteen, thank God! Dulness is a
fulcrum and your son is getting ready to put a lever under the world."

At Amherst, Henry Ward stood well at the foot of his class. He read
everything except what was in the curriculum, and never allowed his
studies to interfere with his college course. He reveled in the debating
societies, and was always ready to thrash