Learned from Customers.
They found he was a simple, enthusiastic man, without much knowledge of the world and of its ways. He had been living among books practically all his life, and they represented everything to him, and for them he had sacrificed practically everything. But underneath the naïveté there were the solidity and thoroughness of the scholar. Trombetti had cultivated his natural aptitude for languages by the most exhaustive studies and at a cost few men would care to meet. After the dull routine and hard work of the school year he employed his vacations in traveling about from one library to another in order to consult and study the books he could not afford to buy. On these trips black bread, wayside pot-herbs, and fruit given him from vineyards and orchards formed his fare.
He managed to buy some books, painfully saving the money cent by cent, and when other scholars discovered him he had already gathered together a fairly good library. In that library the chief place was occupied by a tattered old French grammar, a book he had bought for five cents when a boy, and from which he had learned his first foreign language.
"How did you manage to acquire such an amount of knowledge?" one of the judges asked him.
"I began when I was a barber," he said.
"A barber!"
"Yes. When a man sat in my chair I let him talk. I got from one a new word, from another a new variation in dialect. So even there I was learning all the time."