was eight years old, and then I had
to turn in and work thirteen hours a day. * * * * From the days when we
used to spell out Crusoe and old Bunyan there had grown up in me a
devouring hunger to read books. It made small matter what they were, so
they were books. Half a volume of an old encyclopaedia came along--the
first I had ever seen. How many times I went through that I cannot even
guess. I remember that I read some old reports of the Missionary Society
with the greatest delight.

"There were chapters in them about China and Labrador. Yet I think it is
in reading, as it is in eating, when the first hunger is over you begin
to be a little critical, and will by no means take to garbage if you are
of a wholesome nature. And I remember this because it touches this
beautiful valley of the Hudson. I could not go home for the Christmas of
1839, and was feeling very sad about it all, for I was only a boy; and
sitting by the fire, an old farmer came in and said: 'I notice thou's
fond of reading, so I brought thee summat to read.' It was Irving's
'Sketch Book.' I had never heard of the work. I went at it, and was 'as
them that dream.' No such delight had touched me since the old days of
Crusoe. I saw the Hudson and the Catskills, took poor Rip at once into
my heart, as everybody has, pitied Ichabod while I laughed at him,
thought the old Dutch feast a most admirable thing, and long before I
was through, all regret at my lost Christmas had gone down with the
wind, and I had found out there are books and books. That vast hunger to
read never left me. If there was no candle, I poked my head down to the
fire; read while I was eating, blowing the bellows, or walking from one
place to another. I could read and walk four miles an hour. The world
centred in books. There was no thought in my mind of any good to come
out of it; the good lay in the reading. I had no more idea of being a
minister than you elder men who were boys then, in this town, had that I
should be here to-night to tell this story. Now, give a boy a passion
like this for anything, books or business, painting or farming,
mechanism or music, and you give him thereby a lever to lift his world,
and a patent of nobility, if the thing he does is noble. There were two
or three of my mind about books. We became companions, and gave the
roughs a wide berth. The books did their work, too, about that drink,
and fought the devil with a finer fire."

"In education," says Herber