CHAPTER III

T

YOUTH

HIS chapter includes fifteen years, from twenty to thirty-five, marked in my life by the fact that

I left home never to return except as a transient visitor; having spent my life in faithful servitude to my parents, due them till majority, twenty-one, having in the good providence of God raised a fine horsewhich I sold for $90, a big price for that day, and took some of the money to pay a young man to work on my father's farm till my majority, June 3, and having enough left to pay my way a session in school, to which I had to walk fifty-five miles over rugged mountains and flooded rivers in order to study English grammar, as it was not taught in my native land, where we had nothing in the educational curriculum except reading, spelling, writing, and primary arithmetic, and I had been out of school five years for the want of a teacher, as I had gone as far as I could in our common schools; exceedingly proficient in spelling, which was much ap-preciated in that country, spelling-matches largely attended, with thrilling interest, the last day of the school always devoted to competition spelling alone, to the delightful edification of the multitude always thronging that occasion.

(t) I shall never forget the closing day of our school

when another, including teacher, pupils, and quite a lot of people came to us to down us all in this competition spelling, in which nothing was used but Webster's Spelling Book from beginning to end, the teacher using the whole book at his own discretion. When they arrived and crowded our house, having boasted over their anticipated victory, turning us all down, our teacher took your humble servant, then a little lad, to begin the campaign, the other teacher calling out his scholars ad libitum, and so they began with the little people in monosyllables, moving on to dissyllables, trisyllables, etc., everyone going down as soon as he or she missed a word, as I knew the whole spelling book by memory, till actually the whole school got up one by one and stood by me in competition spelling, quite a lot of then grown juveniles, and myself a little lad, till finally the last one, a gigantic youth, moved out with a sanguine determination to have the victory, when they had passed through the book to the last section of it, which was a vocabulary of words with their definitions arranged alphabetically; (c) when they reached the word "dun," "to urge for money," he spelled it correctly, and they gave me the same word defined "a brown color" and then "done," "finished" to him again, and he roared aloud "d-u-n," which I knew to be incorrect and consequently did not wait for the teacher to turn it over to me, but proceeded to spell it correctly, which wound up the spelling-match, our teacher telling the people that they had in that little boy, who had turned down the whole school, a

speciman of his students, when the people grabbed me up, carried me, and tossed me in a regular jubilee.

(d) As already stated, at the age of twenty, I went away, fifty-five miles to reach a grammar school, where I studied grammar for the first time in all my life and made so rapid proficiency as to be well competent to teach it, as well as the higher arithmetic, in which my teachers had proved so incompetent that I had to stay at home those five years, in which I took out of the wild woods a splendid farm for my father and mother, this day in a high state of cultivation; working hard all day, winter and summer, and reading a good book till midnight; studying over what I read through the day and preparing big speeches for our debating society, which I found so helpful in the development of my oratorical gifts for the oncoming life work of preaching the Gospel, and at the same time, the arduous physical labor so felicitously developing an iron constitution, giving me vigorous health, for all climates and countries in my peregrinations around the world, preaching the Gospel in our great foreign fields, India, Burmah, Malaya, China, Japan, Africa, and the islands of the sea.

(e) As I was under the necessity of making all the money for my collegiate education, a thousand dollars and six years' labor, by teaching school, as there were no factories in my native land at that time to work little people, and nothing commanded money in the way of physical labor but cutting those great trees into rails, for which I was never physically competent like President Lincoln, born and reared in the same coun

try, a generation my senior, like me in utter poverty, but made his first money by rail-making at twenty-five cents a hundred, went away to college, as I did, but he had Herculean physical power to wield the ax and the maul and manipulate those gigantic trees, for which I was not equal, and while I cleared my father's farm, we had to hire a stalwart man to make the rails needed to fence it.

(f) For the above reasons when I had used my horse money for a session in the high school, I proceeded to offer my services as a teacher, when the trustees all said, "Will, we are satisfied that you have a better education than the teachers we have been using, but you could not make the children mind to save your life as you are but a child yourself and we are sorry to disappoint you, but can not help it. You will have to wait patiently until you get older." I was twenty years old, but my face was beardless and blooming like a rosy lassie, like David when Samuel went to his father's house to anoint a king to reign over Israel, and Jesse brought out his other six boys, as David was the youngest, leaving him with the sheep; taking it for granted that he was too little to be anointed king.

(g) Beginning with Eliab, the oldest, gigantic and brilliant, and followed by Abinadab and in the order of their ages by all of them; every time God saying to him, "He is not the one, pass him by." Jesse, at first, when Samuel asked him if that was all, said yes, because he thought David was too little and shabby to be eligible, and consequently he did not count him, and

was really opposed to sending for him, but courteously, acquiescing in the importunate appeal of the prophet, assuring him that there would be nothing wrong in testing the matter; when he comes puffing and blowing, having run hard from his flock in order to expedite his speedy return, lest some evil might befall them; rosy and beautiful looking, not stalwart and masculine, but handsome and lovely, like a little girl, when God said to Samuel, "He is the one, arise and anoint him." So I tried several districts, as teaching was my only hope of commanding the financial resources necessary to a thorough college education, for which I was sighing and crying.

(h) At every trustee meeting, I was turned down the same way, on the allegation that I could not manage the children, and consequently would not do. In my peregrinations throughout that vast woodland country, I ran on to a schoolhouse and made inquiry, and they said there was no school in it. I ascertained the way to the trustees, tracked them all up and asked them if they would let me use that house, when they unanimously answered in the affirmative, stating that they would rather have a school in it than to have it stand empty; but, making the same objection to me, and, unasked, stating that they would not employ me, but as they had no school I could have the house. Then I told them to tell everybody I would begin the next Monday morning and to tell all the children to come. As they would not employ me, I did not feel free to attempt a subscription school and so I cordially invited them all to send their children, saying nothing about