Even his father seemed to take pride in the hickory clock that he next constructed. It was in the form of a scythe to symbolize Time, the pendulum being a bunch of arrows to suggest the flight of the minutes. A thermometer and barometer were next evolved, and automatic contrivances to light the fire and to feed the horses at a given time.
One day a friendly neighbor, who recognized that the boy was a real mechanical genius, advised him to take his whittled inventions to the State Fair at Madison. There two of his wooden clocks and the thermometer were given a place of honor in the Fine Arts Hall, where they attracted much attention. It was generally agreed that this farm-boy from the backwoods had a bright future.
A student from the university persuaded the young inventor that he might be able to work his way through college. Presenting himself to the dean in accordance with this friendly advice, young Muir told his story, explaining that except for a two-month term in the country he had not been to school since he had left Scotland in his twelfth year. He was received kindly, given a trial in the preparatory department, and after a few weeks transferred to the freshman class.
During the four years of his college life John Muir made his way by teaching school a part of each winter and doing farm-work summers. He sometimes cut down the expense of board to fifty cents a week by living on potatoes and mush, which he cooked for himself at the dormitory furnace. Pat, the janitor, would do anything for this young man who could make such wonderful things. Years afterward he pointed out his room to visitors and tried to describe the wonders it had contained. It had, indeed, looked like a branch of the college museum, with its numerous botanical and geological specimens and curious mechanical contrivances.
Although he spent four years at the State University, he did not take the regular course, but devoted himself chiefly to chemistry, physics, botany, and geology, which, he thought, would be most useful to him. Then, without graduating, he started out “on a glorious botanical and geological excursion which has lasted,” he said, in concluding the story of his early life, “for fifty years and is not yet completed.”
He journeyed afoot to Florida, sleeping on the ground wherever night found him. “I wish I knew where I was going,” he wrote to a friend who asked about his plans. “Only I know that I seem doomed to be ‘carried of the spirit into the wilderness.’ ”
Because he loved the whole fair earth and longed to know something of the story that its rocks and trees might tell, he wandered on and on. After going to Cuba, a siege of tropical fever, contracted by sleeping on swampy ground, caused him to give up for a time a cherished plan to make the acquaintance of the vegetation along the Amazon.
“Fate and flowers took me to California,” he said. He found there his true Florida (Land of Flowers), and he found, also, what became the passion of his life and his life work—the noble mountains, the great trees, and the marvelous Yosemite. Here he lived year after year, climbing the mountains, descending into the cañons, lovingly, patiently working to decipher the story of the rocks, and to make the wonder and beauty which thrilled his soul a heritage for mankind forever.
He lived for months at a time in the Yosemite Valley, whose marvels he knew in every mood of sunshine, moonlight, dawn, sunset, storm, and winter whiteness of frost and snow. He would wander for days on the heights without gun or any provisions except bread, tea, a tin cup, pocket-knife, and short-handled ax.
Once, on reading a magazine article by an enthusiastic young mountain-climber, who dilated upon his thrilling adventures in scaling Mount Tyndall, Mr. Muir commented dryly: “He must have given himself a lot of trouble. When I climbed Tyndall, I ran up and back before breakfast.”