"
"I should say he was a reader!" Bill declared. "Why, when he was eleven
years old he had read Hume's History of England all through and--"
"Understood about a quarter of it, I reckon," laughed Ted.
"Understood more than you think," Bill retorted. "He did more in that
library than just read an old encyclopedia; he got every book off the
shelves, one after the other, and dipped into them all, but of course,
some didn't interest him. He read a lot on 'most every subject; mostly
about science and chemistry and engineering and mechanics, but a lot
also on law and even moral philosophy and what you call it?
oh--ethics--and all that sort of thing. He had to read to find out
things; there seemed to be no one who could tell him the half that he
wanted to know, and I guess a lot of people got pretty tired of having
him ask so many questions they couldn't answer. And when they would say,
'I don't know,' he'd get mad and yell: '_Why_ don't you know?'"
"Hume's history,--why, we have that at home, in ten volumes. If he got
outside of all of that he was going some!" declared Ted.
"Well, he did, and all of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
too."
"Holy cats! What stopped him?" Ted queried.
"He didn't stop--never stopped. But he had to earn his living--didn't
he? He couldn't read all the books and find out about everything right
off. But you bet he found out a lot, and he believes that after a fellow
gets some rudiments of education he can learn more by studying in his
own way and experimenting than by just learning by rote and rule.
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