the case, of course.

If any one had ever given him a task in which he could have seen cause
working to effect, in which he could have found by personal experiment a
single fact that belonged to him, his own by divine right of discovery,
he would have counted labor or study all joy.

He was one incarnate Why and How, one brooding wonder and interrogation
point. "Why does the sun drive away the stars? Why do the leaves turn
red and gold? What makes the seed swell in the earth? From whence comes
the life hidden in the egg under the bird's breast? What holds the moon
in the sky? Who regulates her shining? Who moves the wind? Who made
me, and what am I? Who, why, how whither? If I came from God but only
lately, teach me his lessons first, put me into vital relation with
life and law, and then give me your dead signs and equivalents for real
things, that I may learn more and more, and ever more and ever more."

There was no spirit in Edgewood bold enough to conceive that Tony
learned anything in the woods, but as there was never sufficient school
money to keep the village seat of learning open more than half the year
the boy educated himself at the fountain head of wisdom, and knowledge
of the other half. His mother, who owned him for a duckling hatched
from a hen's egg, and was never quite sure he would not turn out a black
sheep and a crooked stick to boot, was obliged to confess that Tony had
more useless information than any boy in the village. He knew just where
to find the first Mayflowers, and would bring home the waxen beauties
when other people had scarcely begun to think about the spring. He could
tell where to look for the rare fringed gentian, the yellow violet, the
Indian pipe. There were clefts in the rocks of the Indian Cellar where,
when every one else failed, he could find harebells and columbines.

When his tasks were done, and the other boys were amusing themselves
each in his own way, you would find Tony lying flat on the pine needles
in the woods, listening to the notes of the wild birds, and imitating
them patiently, til you could scarcely tell which was boy and which was
bird; and if you could, the birds couldn't, for many a time he coaxed
the bobolinks and thrushes to perch on the low boughs above his head and
chirp to him as if he were a feathered brother. There was nothing about
the building of nests with which he was not familiar. He could have
taken hold and helped if the birds had not been so