grew faster and faster, until at
length in most studies he outstripped all the rest.

I need hardly repeat that the constant exercise of his mind through his
fingers, in giving a second existence outside of him to what had its
first existence inside him--that is, in his mind, made it far easier for
him to understand the relations of things that go to make up a science.
A boy who could put a box together must find Euclid easier--the Second
Book particularly--than one who had no idea of the practical relations
of the boundaries of spaces; one who could contrive a machine like his
water-wheel, must be able to understand the interdependence of the parts
of a sentence better than one equally gifted otherwise, but who did not
know how one wheel could move another. Everything he did would help his
arithmetic, and geography, and history; and these and those and all
things besides, would help him to understand poetry.

In his Latin sentences he found the parts fit into each other like
dove-tailing; finding the terms of equations, he said, was like
inventing machines, and he soon grew clever at solving them. It was not
from his manual abilities alone that his father had given him the name
of Gutta-Percha Willie, but from the fact that his mind, once warmed to
interest, could accommodate itself to the peculiarities of any science,
just as the gutta-percha which is used for taking a mould fits itself to
the outs and ins of any figure.

He still employed his water-wheel to pull him out of bed in the middle
of the night. He had, of course, to make considerable alterations in, or
rather additions to, its machinery, after changing his bed-room, for it
had then to work in a direction at right angles to the former; but this
he managed perfectly.

It is well for Willie's reputation with a certain, and that not a small
class of readers, that there was something even they would call useful
in several of his inventions and many of his efforts; in his hydraulics,
for instance, by means of which he saved old Tibby's limbs; in his
house-building, too, by means of which they were able to take in
grannie; and, for a long time now, he had been doing every little repair
wanted in the house. If a lock went wrong, he would have it off at once
and taken to pieces. If less would not do, he carried it to the smithy,
but very seldom troubled Mr Willett about it, for he had learned to do
small jobs, and to heat and work and temper a piece of iron with