lad soon after apprenticed himself to a blacksmith in his native village.

He was an ardent reader of books from childhood up, and he was enabled to
gratify this taste by means of a very small village library, which
contained several books of history, of which he was naturally fond. This
boy, however, was a shy, devoted student, brave to maintain what he
thought right, but so bashful that he was known to hide in the cellar
when his parents were going to have company.

As his father's long sickness had kept him out of school for some time,
he was the more earnest to learn during his apprenticeship--particularly
mathematics, since he desired to become, among other things, a good
surveyor. He was obliged to work from ten to twelve hours a day at the
forge, but while he was blowing the bellows he employed his mind in doing
sums in his head. His biographer gives a specimen of these calculations
which he wrought out without making a single figure:

"How many yards of cloth, three feet in width, cut into strips an inch
wide, and allowing half an inch at each end for the lap, would it require
to reach from the centre of the earth to the surface, and how much would
it all cost at a shilling a yard?"

He would go home at night with several of these sums done in his head,
and report the results to an elder brother, who had worked his way
through Williams College. His brother would perform the calculations
upon a slate, and usually found his answers correct.

When he was about half through his apprenticeship he suddenly took it
into his head to learn Latin, and began at once through the assistance of
the same elder brother. In the evenings of one winter he read the Aeneid