So with great diffidence I asked the lecturer
while he was arranging his things, if he was not going to put water
into the jar.

"No, my lad," was his reply, "I put lightning into it."

I wondered how the "lightning" was going to be conveyed to the
interior surface of the glass without any conductor, such as water,
but was too much abashed to ask the question.

Moore's "Navigator" taught not only a very crude sort of trigonometry,
but a good deal about the warship of his time. To a boy living on
the seacoast, who naturally thought a ship of war one of the greatest
works of man, the book was of much interest.

Notwithstanding the intellectual pleasure which I have described,
my boyhood was on the whole one of sadness. Occasionally my
love of books brought a word of commendation from some visitor,
perhaps a Methodist minister, who patted me on the head with a word
of praise. Otherwise it caused only exclamations of wonder which
were distasteful.

"You would n't believe what larnin' that boy has got. He has more
larnin' than all the people around here put together," I heard
one farmer say to another, looking at me, in my own view of the
case, as if I were some monster misshapen in the womb. Instead of
feeling that my bookish taste was something to be valued, I looked
upon myself as a _lusus naturae_ whom Nature had cruelly formed to
suffer from an abnormal constitution, and lamented that somehow I
never could be like other boys.

The maladroitness described by my father, of which I was fully
conscious, added to the feeling of my unfitness for the world around
me. The skill required on a farm was above my reach, where efficiency
in driving oxen was one of the most valued of accomplishments.
I keenly felt my inability to acquire even respectable mediocrity in
this branch of the agricultural profession. It was mortifying to
watch the dexterous motions of the whip and listen to the torrent
of imperatives with which a young farmer would set a team of these
stolid animals in motion after they had failed to respond to my
gentle requests, though conveyed in the best of ox language.

I had indeed gradually formed, from reading, a vague conception
of a different kind of world,--a world of light,--where dwelt men
who wrote books and people who knew the men who wrote books,--where
lived boys who went to college and devoted themselves to learning,
instead of driving oxen. I longed much to get into this world, but
no p