happened to meet with a book, written by
one Tryon, recommending a vegetable diet. I determined to go into it.
My brother, being yet unmarried, did not keep house, but boarded
himself and his apprentices in another family. My refusing to eat
flesh occasioned an inconveniency, and I was frequently chid for my
singularity. I made myself acquainted with Tryon's manner of preparing
some of his dishes, such as boiling potatoes or rice, making hasty
pudding, and a few others, and then proposed to my brother, that if he
would give me, weekly, half the money he paid for my board, I would
board myself. He instantly agreed to it, and I presently found that I
could save half what he paid me. This was an additional fund for
buying books. But I had another advantage in it. My brother and the
rest going from the printing-house to their meals, I remained there
alone, and, dispatching presently my light repast, which often was no
more than a bisket or a slice of bread, a handful of raisins or a tart
from the pastry-cook's, and a glass of water, had the rest of the time
till their return for study, in which I made the greater progress,
from that greater clearness of head and quicker apprehension which
usually attend temperance in eating and drinking.

And now it was that, being on some occasion made asham'd of my
ignorance in figures, which I had twice failed in learning when at
school, I took Cocker's book of Arithmetick, and went through the
whole by myself with great ease. I also read Seller's and Shermy's
books of Navigation, and became acquainted with the little geometry
they contain; but never proceeded far in that science. And I read
about this time Locke _On Human Understanding_,[19] and the _Art of
Thinking_, by Messrs. du Port Royal.[20]

[19] John Locke (1632-1704), a celebrated English
philosopher, founder of the so-called "common-sense"
school of philosophers. He drew up a constitution for
the colonists of Carolina.

[20] A noted society of scholarly and devout men
occupying the abbey of Port Royal near Paris, who
published learned works, among them the one here
referred to, better known as the _Port Royal Logic_.

While I was intent on improving my language, I met with an English
grammar (I think it was Greenwood's), at the end of which there were
two little sketches of the arts of rhetoric and logic, the latter
finishing with a specimen of a dispute in the Socratic[21] method; and
soo