ear advantage of that energy of nerve and that sort of twill in
the muscular texture which give tight little fellows more size than they
measure and more weight than they weigh." At school he had under his
charge a brother, two years younger than himself, who was once called up
by the master to be whipped. This disturbed Elisha's notions of justice
and his conceptions of the duties of a guardian, and, springing from his
seat, he exclaimed, "Don't whip him, he's such a little fellow!--whip
me!" The master, interpreting this to be mutiny, which really was
intended for fair compromise, answered, "I'll whip you, too, Sir!"
Strung for endurance, the sense of injustice changed his mood to
defiance, and such fight as he was able to make quickly converted the
discipline into a fracas, and Elisha left the school with marks which
required explanation.

In his eighteenth year he was prostrated by a disease which developed
into inflammation of the lining membrane of the heart, from which he
never recovered. The verdict of the physician was ever in his mind: "You
may fall at any time as suddenly as from [by] a musket-shot." His life
was afterwards, indeed, like the life of a soldier constantly under
fire. Instead of making him a valetudinary, this continual liability to
death aided to make him a hero. He acted in the spirit of his father's
advice,--"If you must die, die in harness." Dr. Elder proves that his
existence was prolonged by the hardihood which made him careless of
death. "The current of his life shows convincingly that incessant toil
and exposure was [were] a sound hygienic policy in his case. Naturally
his physical constitution was a case of coil springs, compacted till
they quivered with their own mobility; nervous disease had added its
irritability, and mental energy electrified them. It was doing or dying,
with him. And it was not a tyrant selfishness, a wild ambition, that
ruled his life, but a rare concurrence of mental aptitude, moral
impulse, and bodily necessity, that kept him incessant in adventure."
Nothing could damp this ardor. He contracted the peculiar disease of
every country and climate he visited, and was frequently on what seemed
his death-bed; but no experience of physical misery had any influence
in blunting his intellectual curiosity or impairing the energies of his
will. One of those elastic natures "who ever with a frolic welcome take
the thunder or the sunshine," his whole existence was wedded to a