help to make either a boy or a man
popular in a new country. He was a capital shot with rifle or
shot-gun; he was a superb horseman, a tireless walker, and an expert
in all the arts of the hunter.

He was strong and active of body, and better still he was a boy of
better intellect and better education than was common in that country
at that early day when there were few schools and poor ones. His
father was a gentleman of wealth and education, who had removed to
Alabama for the sake of his health a few years before, bringing a
large library with him, and he had educated his children very
carefully, acting as their teacher himself. Sam was ready for college,
and but for Jackson's call for troops he would have been on his way to
Virginia, to attend the old William and Mary University there, at the
time our story begins. When it became known, however, that men were
needed to defend the country against the British, Sam thought it his
duty to help, and reluctantly resolved to postpone the beginning of
his college course for another year.

All these things made Sam Hardwicke a special favorite, and persons a
great deal older than he was, held him in very high regard, on account
of his superior education, but more particularly on account of the
real superiority which was the result of that education; and I want to
say, right here, that the difference between a man or boy whose
education has been good and one who has had very little instruction,
is a good deal greater than many persons think. It is a mistake to
suppose that the difference lies only in what one has learned and the
other has not. What you learn in school is the smallest part of the
good you get there. Half of it is usually worthless as information,
and much of it is sure to be forgotten; but the work of learning it is
not thrown away on that account. In learning it you train and
discipline and cultivate your mind, making it grow both in strength
and in capacity, and so the educated man has really a stronger and
better intellect than he ever would have had without education. Many
persons suppose,--and I have known even college professors who made
the mistake,--that a boy's mind is like a meal-bag, which will hold
just so much and needs filling. They fill it as they would fill the
meal-bag, for the sake of the meal and without a thought of the bag.
In fact a boy's mind is more like the boy himself. It will not do to
try to make a man out of him by stuffing meat