"What is that, David?" she said.
"That's my flutter-wheel, and I feel like breaking it to pieces."
"Why?"
"Well, you see, all the boys made little water-mills to be run by the force of the stream. We call them 'flutter-wheels.' But I made one so curious that it beat them all," he said.
"Show it to me, Davie," she said. And David explained it to her, forgetting all about his unhappiness in the pleasure of showing the little cog-wheels, and the under-shot wheel that drove it.
"And why did you want to break it up?" she asked.
"Because, mother, Sam Peters said that I should never be good for anything but to make flutter-wheels, and it is true, I am afraid."
"If you were a poor man's son, Davie, you might be a good mechanic," said his mother.
That night Davie resolved to be a mechanic. "I won't be a good-for-nothing man in the world. If I can't be a learned professor, I may be a good carpenter or a blacksmith. If I learn to make a good horseshoe, I'll be worth something." So the next morning he asked his father's leave to enter a machine-shop. His father said he might, and with all the school-boys laughing at him, he took his tin-pail with his lunch in it, and went into the shop each morning. And now he began to love books, too. He gathered a library of works on mechanics. Everything relating to machinery he studied. He took up mathematics and succeeded. After a while he rose to a good position in the shop. And he became at last a great railroad engineer. He built that great bridge at Blankville.
"Why," said John Harlan, "I thought your Uncle David built that."