“I got that part of my education,” Cal answered, “partly by being a very good boy and partly by being a very bad one. I’m inclined to think the bad-boy influence contributed even more than the good-boy experience to my store of information. As for remembering things, that is a habit of mind easily cultivated, though the great majority of people neglect it. It consists mainly in careful observation. When people tell you they don’t remember things they have seen, or remember them only vaguely, it usually means that they did not observe the things seen. For example, I remembered where that spring of ours was when we were all parched with thirst, and I knew how to go to it in the dark. That was simply because when I first saw that spring and quenched a very lively thirst there, I decided to remember it and its surroundings in case I should ever have occasion to find it again. So I looked carefully at everything round about from every point of view. I observed that the spring lay just beyond the first bend of the creek and that there was a cluster of big cypress trees very near it. I noticed that the mouth of the creek lay between a little stretch of beach on one side and a dense cane thicket on the other. In short, I carefully observed all the bearings, and having done that, of course I could never forget how to find the spring.”
“Do you always do that sort of thing when you think you may want to find a place again?”
“Yes, of course. Indeed, I do it anyhow, whether there is any occasion or not. For example, when I was visiting you in Boston last year I noticed that there was a little dent in the silver cap over the speaking tube in the dining-room, as if somebody had hit it a little blow. The dent was triangular, I remember.”
“That’s because the thing I hit it with had a triangular face, for I made that dent when I was a little fellow with a curious-looking tool that a repairer of old furniture had in use there. It’s curious that you should have noticed the dent, as it is very small and your back was toward it as you sat at table.”
“Yes, but not as I entered the room. It was then that I saw it.”
“Then that sort of close observation is a habit of mind with you?”
“Yes. I suppose it is partly natural and partly cultivated. I don’t know.”
The two had come by this time to that part of the woods that Tom had named the “squirrel pasture,” and they were soon busy with their guns. But as they walked back toward the camp, loaded with black and gray squirrels, Dick came back to the subject, which seemed deeply to interest him.
“I wonder, Cal,” he said, “if you would mind telling me about those two epochs in your young life—the good-boy and the bad-boy periods?”