Pine to Potomac

by E. K. Cressey

But what puzzled the boy fully as much, was the grave assertion, made without proof, that the sun does not move, when he knew that it did rise and set. Grandpa, and his parents, and Uncle Will, had to hold court every day until these questions were all settled, the testimony all in, and the dreams of the young learner reflected other scenes.

His youth had a great sorrow. No grandson was ever loved and petted and cared for and helped in a thousand ways as his Grandfather Gillespie had helped and loved and cared for him. Though a man of affairs, and carrying on business operations on a large scale and in distant parts, he loved his home and all about him, and took special pride in this boy. The heart of James was truly won. It was his special joy to be up at grandfather’s. It was not the big red apple-tree, nor the great clock on the stairs, nor the old rusty sabre and flint-lock musket, and the many relics of the Revolution that attracted him, but grandfather himself.

But grandfather did not get up, one morning, and the doctor was there, and nobody went to work, and there was general alarm. The delirium of fever was on him, but his strong constitution resisted its ravages of inward fire for days and weeks. Now he went there oftener, walked more softly, asked more eagerly. It all seemed so very strange. There was his great chair vacant, and the hand that had so often lain on his head seemed void of touch and power now. Everything seemed to stop. Books had nothing in them now; papers were unopened. The world grew darker and darker, until one black night, amid a terrific storm, word came that grandfather had just died, and father and mother would not be home for some time. The sun seemed to set to James, and he cried himself to sleep, while the other children bewailed their loss.

The morrow was bright and clear, but full of sadness, and as he looked upon the dear old man lying there, and felt his cold face and hand,—he had never seen death before,—he was filled with wonder. The loss, indeed, was great to him. But his memory was an inspiration, and knowing what grandpa would have him do, he returned to his study with renewed energy and to feel more than ever the worth and power of books the departed one had prized so highly.

Solomon Phillips was a Quaker and a farmer, but a man of strong, powerful intellect, honest as the day was long, painstaking and persevering. Mathematics were his special delight. It is a triumph of skill in teaching to love a hard, difficult science so as to get others to love it, also. In this he succeeded. He felt its worth and power. He would divide 0 by 1 (zero by one), and get infinity, and sit and gaze out into its clear, white depths; and reversing the process he would divide one by zero, and get the same result, and again gaze upon the white depths of a world most beautiful to thought, in its clear, unclouded, not nothingness, but somethingness, and that something infinity. He seemed almost to worship at the shrine of this kingly science, and would tell again and again how brilliant and beautiful, and with what delightful accuracy, the labyrinths of the most gnarled and vexed problems opened to him.

This was the man to give Master James his great lift in preparation for college.

He followed promptly wherever the Quaker master led the way. Week after week, and month after month, and term after term, the drill went on. There were no bounds or limits then, as in academies now, so these were passed as ships pass the equator, or railroad trains pass state or county lines. Hard study was the work of the hour, but hard study made work easy, and this was the secret, of all his progress,—constant study brought constant victory.

When his Grandfather Gillespie died, his father took up the drill in history, and Hume’s England was gone over carefully, beside Marshall’s Life of Washington and a volume of Macaulay’s Essays which he got hold of as a young boy.

His father had a fine, large library, in which he delved by day and night, and aroused his son not only by example to constant application, but also by persistent pressure. Here is the real key to that early career of youthful days so thoroughly utilized,—the father’s intelligent watchfulness, and careful method, and constant direction. Only gauge the wheel to the stream, and the grist to the wheel, and there will be no danger.

The father determined his son should be educated to the utmost, and planned and wrought accordingly. No time was lost, and no undue haste made; it was the persistency of constant pressure that won the day.