as if the adjacent trees and bushes were sufficiently well known, it
simply looked around at them and bolted off without much dressing,
indicating, I thought, that the distance to the hive was not great. I
followed on and very soon discovered it in the bottom log of a
corn-field fence, but some lucky fellow had discovered it before me
and robbed it. The robbers had chopped a large hole in the log, taken
out most of the honey, and left the poor bees late in the fall, when
winter was approaching, to make haste to gather all the honey they
could from the latest flowers to avoid starvation in the winter.

VII

KNOWLEDGE AND INVENTIONS

Hungry for Knowledge--Borrowing Books--Paternal
Opposition--Snatched Moments--Early Rising proves a Way out of
Difficulties--The Cellar Workshop--Inventions--An Early-Rising
Machine--Novel Clocks--Hygrometers, etc.--A Neighbor's Advice.

I learned arithmetic in Scotland without understanding any of it,
though I had the rules by heart. But when I was about fifteen or
sixteen years of age, I began to grow hungry for real knowledge, and
persuaded father, who was willing enough to have me study provided my
farm work was kept up, to buy me a higher arithmetic. Beginning at the
beginning, in one summer I easily finished it without assistance, in
the short intervals between the end of dinner and the afternoon start
for the harvest-and hay-fields, accomplishing more without a teacher
in a few scraps of time than in years in school before my mind was
ready for such work. Then in succession I took up algebra, geometry,
and trigonometry and made some little progress in each, and reviewed
grammar. I was fond of reading, but father had brought only a few
religious books from Scotland. Fortunately, several of our neighbors
had brought a dozen or two of all sorts of books, which I borrowed and
read, keeping all of them except the religious ones carefully hidden
from father's eye. Among these were Scott's novels, which, like all
other novels, were strictly forbidden, but devoured with glorious
pleasure in secret. Father was easily persuaded to buy Josephus' "Wars
of the Jews," and D'Aubigne's "History of the Reformation," and I
tried hard to get him to buy Plutarch's Lives, which, as I told him,
everybody, even religious people, praised as a grand good book; but he
would have nothing to do with the old pagan until the graham bread and
anti-flesh doctrines came suddenly into our b