“Would you say that to work so as to be able to live like this should
be the aim of a young man?”
“By no means. On the contrary, his aim should be to live in such a
way as will give his mind the greatest freedom and peace. This can be
very often obtained by wanting less of material things and more of
intellectual ones. A man who achieved such an aim would be as well off
as the most distinguished man in any field. Money-getting is half a
mania, and some other ‘getting’ propensities are manias also. The man
who gets content comes nearest to being reasonable.”
“I should like,” I said, “to illustrate your point of view from the
details of your own life.”
“Students of nature do not, as a rule, have eventful lives. I was
born in Roxbury, New York, in 1837. That was a time when conditions
were rather primitive. My father was a farmer, and I was raised among
the woods and fields. I came from an uncultivated, unreading class of
society, and grew up amid surroundings the least calculated to awaken
the literary faculty. Yet I have no doubt that daily contact with the
woods and fields awakened my interest in the wonders of nature, and
gave me a bent toward investigation in that direction.”
“Did you begin early to make notes and write upon nature?” I questioned.
“Not before I was sixteen or seventeen. Earlier than that, the art of
composition had anything but charms for me. I remember that while at
school, at the age of fourteen, I was required, like other students,
to write ‘compositions’ at stated times, but I usually evaded the duty
one way or another. On one occasion, I copied something from a comic
almanac, and unblushingly handed it in as my own. But the teacher
detected the fraud, and ordered me to produce a twelve-line composition
before I left school. I remember I racked my brain in vain, and the
short winter day was almost closing when Jay Gould, who sat in the
seat behind me, wrote twelve lines of doggerel on his slate and passed
it slyly over to me. I had so little taste for writing that I coolly
copied that, and handed it in as my own.”