At a later period, when I had discovered that tools were a necessary complement to my intellectual well-being, I brought my insatiable desire to _make_ something to the assistance of my equally insatiable desire to _go_ somewhere. From a sugar-box and a pair of perambulator wheels I fashioned a cart, between the shafts of which I travelled many leagues into the wilds of Middlesex and Essex. "Leagues" must be understood in the sense in which Don Quixote would have used the word. I do not suppose I ever traversed more than eight or ten miles at a time. But never, while the desire to go out and see is living within me, shall I forget how, one breathless August day, when the air was heavy with the aroma of creosoted sleepers, my small brother and I stared through the gates of a level crossing, and saw Epping Forest in the blue distance! O phantoms of Cortes, Balboa, and De Soto, wert thou there? O Sir Francis, hadst thou that thrill when "_Drake went down to the Horn, And England was crowned thereby_"? But I grow magniloquent. My object is attained if I can but show that when my friend took me under his wing at the Institute long years agone, when the innocent-looking lad with the fair hair, that might have had an incipient tonsure superimposed without incongruity, drifted away from text-books of mechanics, and sat down with Schiller, Ducoudray, and Carlyle, he little imagined how adventurous a spirit there boiled under that demure disguise of retiring scholarship--a spirit fired with an untamable passion for looking over the back-garden wall! Even perambulator wheels give out, however. I forget whether the wheels of my little cart failed before my mother's patience, or the reverse. I was growing away from those tiny journeys; my head bulged with loose heaps of intellectual rubbish acquired during long hours of unsociable communion with a box of books in the lumber room. I knew the date of Evil Merodach's accession to the Assyrian throne, but I did not know who killed Cock Robin. I knew more than Keats about the discovery of the Pacific, but I did not know Keats. I knew exactly how pig-iron was smelted, but I did not know the iron which enters into the soul. I knew how to differentiate between living and non-living matter, but I did not know that I was alive. Then a new heaven and a new hell opened before me; I was sent away to school.