" much more efficaciously than the best article a Brougham
or a Mill could write on the subject.

CHAPTER VIII.

Spring had come again; and one beautiful May-day, Leonard Fairfield sate
beside the little fountain which he had now actually constructed in the
garden. The butterflies were hovering over the belt of flowers which he
had placed around his fountain, and the birds were singing overhead.
Leonard Fairfield was resting from his day's work, to enjoy his
abstemious dinner, beside the cool play of the sparkling waters, and,
with the yet keener appetite of knowledge, he devoured his book as he
munched his crusts.

A penny tract is the shoeing-horn of literature; it draws on a great
many books, and some too tight to be very useful in walking. The penny
tract quotes a celebrated writer, you long to read him; it props a
startling assertion by a grave authority, you long to refer to it.
During the nights of the past winter, Leonard's intelligence had made
vast progress: he had taught himself more than the elements of
mechanics, and put to practice the principles he had acquired, not only
in the hydraulical achievement of the fountain, nor in the still more
notable application of science, commenced on the stream in which
Jackeymo had fished for minnows, and which Lenny had diverted to the
purpose of irrigating two fields, but in various ingenious contrivances
for the facilitation or abridgment of labor, which had excited great
wonder and praise in the neighborhood. On the other hand, those rabid
little tracts, which dealt so summarily with the destinies of the human
race, even when his growing reason, and the perusal of works more
classical or more logical, had led him to perceive that they were
illiterate, and to suspect that they jumped from premises to conclusions
with a celerity very different from the careful ratiocination of
mechanical science, had still, in the citations and references wherewith
they abounded, lured him on to philosophers more specious and more
perilous. Out of the Tinker's bag he had drawn a translation of
Condorcet's _Progress of Man_, and another of Rousseau's _Social
Contract_. These had induced him to select from the tracts in the
Tinker's miscellany those which abounded most in professions of
philanthropy, and predictions of some coming Golden Age, to which old
Saturn's was a joke--tracts so mild and mother-like in their language,
that it required a much more practical experience than Len