of men!

Here he lived and here he worked, when he could get work. He paid no
rent now: he wanted no furniture; he struggled no longer to appear to
the world as his equals appeared; he required no more money than would
procure for his family and himself the barest necessaries of life; he
suffered no interruptions from his fellow-workmen, who thought him a
madman, and kept out of his way; and--most precious privilege of his new
position--he could at last shorten his hours of labour, and lengthen his
hours of study, with impunity. Having no temptations to spend money, no
hard demands of an inexorable landlord to answer, he could now work with
his brains as well as his hands; he could toil at his problems,
scratching them upon the tops of rocks, under the open sky, amid the
silence of the great moor. Henceforth, nothing moved, nothing depressed
him. The storms of winter rushed over his unsheltered dwelling, but
failed to dislodge him. He taught his family to brave solitude and cold
in the cavern among the rocks, as _he_ braved them. In the cell that he
had scooped out for his wife (the roof of which has now fallen in) some
of his children died, and others were born. They point out the rock
where he used to sit on calm summer evenings, absorbed over his tattered
copy of Euclid. A geometrical "puzzle," traced by his hand, still
appears on the stone. When he died, what became of his family, no one
can tell. Nothing more is known of him than that he never quitted the
wild place of his exile; that he continued to the day of his death to
live contentedly with his wife and children, amid a civilized nation,
under such a shelter as would hardly serve the first savage tribes of
the most savage country--to live, starving out poverty and want on a
barren wild; forsaking all things enduring all things for the love of
Knowledge, which he could still nobly follow through trials and
extremities, without encouragement of fame or profit, without vantage
ground of station or wealth, for its own dear sake. Beyond this, nothing
but conjecture is left. The cell, the bed-place, the lines traced on the
rocks, the inscription of the year in which he hewed his habitation out
of them, are all the memorials that remain of Daniel Gumb.

We lingered about the wild habitation of the stonemason and his family,
until sunset. Long shadows of rocks lay over the moor, the breeze had
freshened and was already growing chill, when we set forth, at last, to
t