He had heard that the thoughts of youth were of vast length, and perhaps he believed it. But he did not think John's had reached quite as far as wishing to be a cobbler in a country village.
And it must be confessed that few, seeing the appetite the boy brought to his plate of cold turkey and "snowed" potato, would have suspected him of longing for a "crust of bread and a drink of cold water."
The truth was, he had been of late ransacking his grandfather's library and had found besides sea-stories and stories of wrecks, and foreign lands and pirates and deep sea treasure—what interested him more than all, a volume of biographies of self-made men.
He had lingered longingly over their boyhoods; their brief school times (when such times were lacking altogether he liked both man and story better); their privations, struggles, self-reliance and success. The success interested him the least. That came, of course, he decided, to all who tried hard enough. But the privations! The struggle! The self-reliance! How his eyes shone and his heart beat at it!
There was the story of Richard Arkwright, the great mechanician. He was never at school in his life—never forced to do ridiculous sums, to spell correctly, to parse, to drill, to sing! His biographer said that the only education he ever received he gave himself—that he was fifty years of age when he set to work to learn grammar and to improve his hand-writing. He did not waste the precious hours of his youth over such things. When he was a boy he was apprenticed to a barber, and when he set up in business for himself he occupied an underground cellar and put up his sign—"Come to the subterraneous barber; he shaves for a penny." This caused brisk competition, and a general reduction in barber's prices. Yet not to be beaten, Arkwright altered his sign to "A clean shave for a halfpenny." Then he turned his attention to wig-making, and from that to machine-making. And years and years passed. Years filled with patient labour, privations, obstacles, and at last Success! "Eighteen years after he had constructed his first machine he rose to such estimation in Derbyshire that he was appointed High Sheriff of the county, and shortly afterwards George III conferred upon him the honour of knighthood." So said the book.
Shakespeare, he read, was the son of a butcher and grazier; Sir Cloudesley Shovel, the great admiral, a cobbler's son; Stephenson was an engine-fireman; Turner, the great painter, came from a barber's shop.
Life after life he had turned over of men who had risen from the ranks and gotten for themselves fame and riches. So that at last he came to regard humble birth and poverty as the necessary foundations of ultimate success. He noticed that his heroes all worked hard and patiently; were all brave and sternly self-disciplined, plodding onwards past every obstacle and hardship. But he forgot to notice that they all made the best of that sphere of life into which they were born.
He had quite decided to be a self-made man. That was simple enough. The question that troubled him was what sort of a self-made man to be! A Newton? A Shakespeare? A Stephenson? A Turner? An Arkwright?
The wide choice worried and perplexed him. It was pitiful to his thinking that he could, try and strive as he might, only be one.
He had put himself through several examinations. He had lain under a pear tree and watched the leaves fall; he felt another man had the monopoly of apple trees. And he had decided that the leaves fell because they had become unfastened from the branches, and that they did not fall straight because the wind blew them sideways. And there was an end of the leaves.