y noon, and Mr. Johnson
exclaimed: "Now, Mr. Tardy-Boy, where have you been?"

"At Mr. Miller's shop, pounding out a lead for my pencil. I want you to
look at it. It is the best one I ever had!" And the teacher had to admit
that he never saw a better one.

Another time Robert told the Quaker teacher that he was so busy thinking
up new ideas that he did not have any room in his mind for storing away
what was in dusty books!

Robert loved pictures. There was a large portrait of his beautiful
mother, painted by Benjamin West, which hung in the parlor, and he had
often wished to try and make one like it. He had not been long at school
before a seat-mate brought to school some paints and brushes belonging
to an older brother. As the war was waging, the people had hard work to
get luxuries or money to buy them with, so Robert quite envied the boy
such a prize. He begged to try them, and he made such wonderful
pictures, pictures so much better than any one else in school could
make, that the owner gave the whole outfit to him.

About this time Robert was always buying little packages of quicksilver.
He was trying experiments with it, but he wouldn't tell the other boys
what they were. So they nicknamed him "Quicksilver Bob." Of course, the
men in shops where firearms were made and repaired were very busy.
"Quicksilver Bob" went to these shops every day. The men liked him, and
as he talked with them, he often made suggestions that they were glad to
follow. "That boy will do something big some of these days," they would
say to each other.

When Robert was fourteen, he met a boy who worked in a machine shop, by
the name of Christopher Grumpf. This boy was eighteen, and his father
was a fine fisherman who knew where the largest number of fish could be
caught, and he took the two boys up and down the river in a
flat-bottomed boat that was pushed along by the means of two long poles.
The boat was clumsy, and this poling made the boys' arms ache. Robert
kept thinking there must be a better way of getting that boat through
the water. He went away to visit his aunt but worked all the time on a
set of paddles and the model of a boat on which they could be built. He
tried a set of these paddles on Mr. Grumpf's boat when he got home, and
they worked so well that Mr. Grumpf never used the poles again on his
fishing trips. He found the paddles saved him from having lame muscles.

Robert and his playmates had fine times watching the tw