olumes to choose
from in great city libraries, can have no idea of what a book meant to
this boy in the wilderness. He devoured every one that came into his
hands as a man famishing from hunger devours a crust of bread. He read
and re-read it until he had made the contents his own.

"From everything he read," says Miss Tarbell, "he made long extracts,
with his turkey-buzzard pen and brier-root ink. When he had no paper he
would write on a board, and thus preserve his selections until he
secured a copybook. The wooden fire shovel was his usual slate, and on
its back he ciphered with a charred stick, shaving it off when it had
become too grimy for use. The logs and boards in his vicinity he
covered with his figures and quotations. By night he read and worked as
long as there was light, and he kept a book in the crack of the logs in
his loft to have it at hand at peep of day. When acting as ferryman on
the Ohio in his nineteenth year, anxious, no doubt, to get through the
books of the house where he boarded before he left the place, he read
every night until midnight."

His stepmother said: "He read everything he could lay his hands on, and
when he came across a passage that struck him, he would write it down
on boards if he had no paper, and keep it by him until he could get
paper. Then he would copy it, look at it, commit it to memory, and
repeat it."

His thoroughness in mastering everything he undertook to study was a
habit acquired in childhood. How he acquired this habit he tells
himself. "Among my earliest recollections I remember how, when a mere
child," he says, "I used to get irritated when anybody talked to me in
a way I could not understand. I do not think I ever got angry at
anything else in my life; but that always disturbed my temper, and has
ever since. I can remember going to my little bedroom, after hearing
the neighbors talk of an evening with my father, and spending no small
part of the night walking up and down and trying to make out what was
the exact meaning of some of their--to me--dark sayings.

"I could not sleep, although I tried to, when I got on such a hunt for
an idea until I had caught it; and when I thought I had got it, I was
not satisfied until I had repeated it over and over; until I had put it
in language plain enough, as I thought, for any boy I knew to
comprehend. This was a kind of passion with me, and it has stuck by me;
for I am never easy now when I am handling a thought, till