Looking over my own school days, there are so many things that I would
rather not tell, that it will take very little time and space for me
to use in telling what I am willing that the carping public should know
about my early history.
I began my educational career in a log school house. Finding that other
great men had done that way, I began early to look around me for a log
school house where I could begin in a small way to soak my system full
of hard words and information.
For a time I learned very rapidly. Learning came to me with very little
effort at first. I would read my lesson over once or twice and then take
my place in the class. It never bothered me to recite my lesson and so
I stood at the head of the class. I could stick my big toe through a
knot-hole in the floor and work out the most difficult problem. This
became at last a habit with me. With my knot-hole I was safe, without it
I would hesitate.
A large red-headed boy, with feet like a summer squash and eyes like
those of a dead codfish, was my rival. He soon discovered that I was
very dependent on that knot-hole, and so one night he stole into the
school house and plugged up the knot-hole, so that I could not work my
toe into it and thus refresh my memory.
Then the large red-headed boy, who had not formed the knot-hole habit,
went to the head of the class and remained there.
After I grew larger, my parents sent me to a military school. That is
where I got the fine military learning and stately carriage that I still
wear.
My room was on the second floor, and it was very difficult for me to
leave it at night, because the turnkey locked us up at 9 o'clock every
evening. Still, I used to get out once in awhile and wander around in
the starlight. I do not know yet why I did it, but I presume it was
a kind of somnambulism. I would go to bed thinking so intently of my
lessons that I would get up and wander away, sometimes for miles, in the
solemn night.
One night I awoke and found myself in a watermelon patch. I was never so
ashamed in my life. It is a very serious thing to be awakened so rudely
out of a sound sleep, by a bull dog, to find yourself in the watermelon
vineyard of a man with whom you are not acquainted. I was not on terms
of social intimacy with this man or his dog. They did not belong to our
set. We had never been thrown together before.
After that I was called the great somnambulist and men who had
watermelon conservatories shunned me. But it cured me of my
somnambulism. I have never tried to somnambule any more since that time.
There are other little incidents of my school days that come trooping
up in my memory at this moment, but they were not startling in their
nature. Mine is but the history of one who struggled on year after year,
trying to do better, but most always failing to connect. The boys
of Boston would do well to study carefully my record and then--do
differently.