Robert Fulton

								

door, by the writer.

CHAPTER II
ROBERT FULTON’S BOYHOOD

So many anecdotes have been told about Robert Fulton’s boyhood that
they will fill a whole chapter. It is an inspiration to boys and girls,
who dream of fame through splendid future action, to realize that a
hero usually begins life by a normal childhood, striving to do well the
trivial tasks. Daily duties well done form character, and only character
creates worth.
Robert Fulton studied at home, under his parents’ teaching, until he was
eight years old. By this time the family had returned to Lancaster, and
Robert was considered old enough to attend the school kept by one Caleb
Johnson, a Quaker.
He had learned to read and write and was eager for school. We can fancy
the scene of his entrance to the class-room, his dark eyes bright with
excitement, his curls brushed to parted order, as he encountered for the
first time the austere schoolmaster, an impressive personage in that
day. He was guarded on either side by his fond elder sisters, Peggy
and Belle, but their care could not protect him later from the tutoring
birch, when Caleb Johnson discovered, as he thought, that Robert was “a
dull boy.” The younger sister, Mary,—or Polly, as she was called,—and the
baby brother, Abraham, were at home eager to hear Robert’s description of
school life.
But after all, Robert seems not to have cared very greatly for his books.
His delight lay in visiting the machine-shops of the town, where he spent
all his spare time in trying to make things he needed or wanted. One
day he explained his late arrival at school by saying that he had been
at Nicholas Miller’s shop making a lead-pencil—“the best I ever had,”
he declared. He had pounded out the lead and fitted it so neatly into
a wooden case that Caleb Johnson admitted it was indeed an excellent
pencil. Within a few days,—so eager are children to follow a leader,—all
the boys had made for themselves, with more or less success, pencils like
Robert’s.
Sometimes his plans for making things so filled his thoughts that he
dreamed over his books and was unprepared for recitation; then Caleb
Johnson, after the stern fashion of those days, called him to the desk
and bade him hold forth his hand for a whipping by the ferule. Once, when
the teacher thought him particularly idle, he struck Robert sharply over
the knuckles, saying, “There, that will make you do something!” The boy,
roused by a sense of injustice, replied with politeness yet with reproof:
“Sir, I came here to have something beaten into my brains, and not into
my knuckles.” With head held high and arms folded, he walked back to his
place, seeming even to Caleb Johnson, at the time, “a strange boy.” When
Robert’s mother called at the school to talk over her son’s progress—for
she was worried at his giving so little attention to his books—the master
replied,
“Robert says his head is so full of original ideas that there is no room