eur carpenter in a small way. As yet he
had lived entirely in the backwoods, and had never seen a town or even
a village; but his education in practical work had begun from his very
babyhood, and he was handy after the usual fashion of American or
colonial boys--ready to turn his hand to anything that happened to
present itself. In new countries, where everybody has not got
neighbours and workmen within call, such rough-and-ready handiness is
far more common than in old England. The one carpenter of the
neighbourhood asked James to help him, on the proud day when Tom
brought back his earnings from Michigan, and set about the building of
the frame house, for which he had already collected the unhewn timber.
From that first beginning, by the time he was thirteen, James was
promoted to assist in building a barn; and he might have taken
permanently to a carpenter's life, had it not been that his boyish
passion for reading had inspired him with an equal passion for going to
sea. He had read Marryatt's novels and other sailor tales--what boy
has not?--and he was fired with the usual childish desire to embark
upon that wonderful life of chasing buccaneers, fighting pirates,
capturing prizes, or hunting hidden treasure, which is a lad's
brilliantly coloured fancy picture of an everyday sailor's wet, cold,
cheerless occupation.

At last, when James was about fifteen, his longing for the sea grew so
strong that his mother, by way of a compromise, allowed him to go and
try his luck with the Lake Erie captains at Cleveland. Shipping on the
great lakes, where one can see neither bank from the middle of the wide
blue sheet of water, and where wrecks are unhappily as painfully
frequent as on our own coasts, was quite sufficiently like going to sea
to suit the adventurous young backwoodsman to the top of his bent. But
when he got to Cleveland, a fortunate disappointment awaited him. The
Cleveland captains declined his services in such vigorous seafaring
language (not unmixed with many unnecessary oaths), that he was glad
enough to give up the idea of sailoring, and take a place as driver of
a canal boat from Cleveland to Pittsburg in Pennsylvania, the boat
being under the charge of one of his own cousins. Copper ore was then
largely mined on Lake Superior, where it is very abundant, carried by
ship to Cleveland, down the chain of lakes, and there transferred to
canal boats, which took it on to Pittsburg, the centre of a great coa