Parker one
August afternoon. The poor Lexington millwright looked in surprise at
his youngest son, for it was a busy time, but he saw from the boy's
earnest face that he had no ordinary object in view, and granted the
request. Theodore rose very early the next morning, walked through the
dust ten miles to Harvard College, and presented himself for a
candidate for admission. He had been unable to attend school regularly
since he was eight years old, but he had managed to go three months
each winter, and had reviewed his lessons again and again as he
followed the plow or worked at other tasks. All his odd moments had
been hoarded, too, for reading useful books, which he borrowed. One
book he could not borrow, but he felt that he must have it; so on
summer mornings he rose long before the sun and picked bushel after
bushel of berries, which he sent to Boston, and so got the money to buy
that coveted Latin dictionary.

"Well done, my boy!" said the millwright, when his son came home late
at night and told of his successful examination; "but, Theodore, I
cannot afford to keep you there!" "True, father," said Theodore, "I am
not going to stay there; I shall study at home, at odd times, and thus
prepare myself for a final examination, which will give me a diploma."
He did this; and, by teaching school as he grew older, got money to
study for two years at Harvard, where he was graduated with honor.
Years after, when, as the trusted friend and adviser of Seward, Chase,
Sumner, Garrison, Horace Mann, and Wendell Phillips, his influence for
good was felt in the hearts of all his countrymen, it was a pleasure
for him to recall his early struggles and triumphs among the rocks and
bushes of Lexington.

"The proudest moment of my life," said Elihu Burritt, "was when I had
first gained the full meaning of the first fifteen lines of Homer's
Iliad." Elihu Burritt's father died when he was sixteen, and Elihu was
apprenticed to a blacksmith in his native village of New Britain, Conn.
He had to work at the forge for ten or twelve hours a day; but while
blowing the bellows, he would solve mentally difficult problems in
arithmetic. In a diary kept at Worcester, whither he went some ten
years later to enjoy its library privileges, are such entries as
these,--"Monday, June 18, headache, 40 pages Cuvier's 'Theory of the
Earth,' 64 pages French, 11 hours' forging. Tuesday, June 19, 60 lines
Hebrew, 30 Danish, 10 lines Bohemian, 9 line