le thought they knew was not so. Faraday seemed to be just as
much interested in this kind as in the other. He never learned to mind
only his own business, but was always childishly inquisitive, so he
never was so sure of things as was Frank's father.

Still, it takes all sorts of people to make up a world, and if a person
cannot be like Frank's father, it is not so bad to be like Faraday.

Frank's father would have been shocked at Faraday's first introduction
to the problems of metaphysical speculation. "I remember," he says,
"being a great questioner when young." And one of his first questions
was in regard to the seat of the soul. The question was suggested in
this way. Being a small boy, and seeing the bars of an iron railing, he
felt called upon to try experimentally whether he could squeeze through.
The experiment was only a partial success. He got his head through, but
he could not get it back. Then the physical difficulty suggested the
great metaphysical question, "On which side of the fence am I?"

Frank's father would have said that that was neither the time nor the
place for such speculation, and that the proper way to study philosophy
was to wait till one could sit down in a chair and read it out of a
book. But to Faraday the thoughts he got out of a book never seemed to
be so interesting as those which came to him while he was stuck in the
fence.

When Frank learned a few lines of poetry, he asked to be allowed to say
them to his father.

"'I think,' said his mother, 'your father would like you to repeat them
if you understand them all, but not otherwise.'"

Of course that was the end of any nonsense in that direction. If Frank
was kept away from any poetry he could not altogether understand, he
would soon be grown-up, so that he would not be tempted by any kind of
poetry any more than his father was.

I am sure Frank's father would have disapproved of the way my
Philosopher takes his poetry. His favorite poem is "A frog he would
a-wooing go,"--especially the first quatrain. His analysis is very
defective; he takes it as a whole. He likes the mystery of it, the quick
action, the hearty, inconsequent refrain:--

A frog he would a-wooing go--
Heigh ho! says Rowley--
Whether his mother would let him or no--
With a rowly-powly, gammon and spinach.
Heigh ho! says Anthony Rowley.

This to him is poetry. Everything is lifted above the commonplace. The
frog is