shop pouring
lead into wooden pencils that were better than those he had made before,
and he handed several of them to the master. The man examined them
carefully and said they were the best he had ever had. It was hard to
scold the boy for spending his time in such ways. One time, when the
teacher had tried to rouse his ambition to study history, Robert said to
him: "My head's so full of original notions that there's no vacant room
to store away the records of dusty old books." Yet in spite of these
stories, the boy could not help picking up a great deal of general
information at school, for his mind was always alert, and he was eager
to improve on everything that had been done before.

At this time in his boyhood it was hard to say whether the young Fulton
was more the inventor or the artist, but as soon as the war ended he
decided that he would become a painter, and went to Philadelphia, then
the chief city of the new nation, to study his art. He made enough money
by the use of his pencil and by making drawings for machinists to
support himself, and also saved enough money to buy a small farm for his
widowed mother and younger brothers and sisters.

Benjamin West, the great painter, had lived near Lancaster, and had
heard much of Robert Fulton's boyhood inventions, and he now hunted him
out in Philadelphia, and helped him in his new line of work. The young
artist met Benjamin Franklin and found him eager to aid him in his
plans, and so, by his perseverance and the friends he was fortunate
enough to make, he laid the foundations for his future.

When he became a man, the spirit of the inventor finally overcame that
of the painter. He went abroad and studied in laboratories in England
and France, and then he came home and built a workshop of his own. What
particularly interested him was the uses to which steam might be put,
and he studied its possibilities until he had worked out his plans for a
practical steamboat. How successful those plans were all the world
knows.

It was a great day when the crowds that lined the Hudson River saw the
_Clermont_ prove that the era of sailing vessels had closed, and that of
steamships had dawned. But to the boys who had lived along the Conestoga
it did not seem strange that Robert Fulton had won fame as an inventor;
they had known he could make anything he chose since that second
Independence Day when he had come to his country's rescue with his
home-made sky-rockets.