After the departure of the boys, Sammy took up, with greater enthusiasm than ever, those trains of thought that had been so rudely interrupted by the day's occurrences, and after supper sat down in one corner of the room to reflect. His mother, having spun her stint, began to reel up the yarn. As he sat thinking, and occasionally looking at her as she reeled the yarn from the spindle, he communed thus with himself:-- "If a potter's wheel is an upright spindle with a little wheel on it turned by a band that goes over a big wheel, and my mother's wheel is a level spindle with a little wheel on it turned by a band that goes over a big wheel, then what's the reason, if my mother's wheel is turned upside down, the spindle won't be upright, just as Uncle Seth said a potter's wheel was? And then if there was a round piece put on top to put the clay on, and you turned the big wheel, it would turn the clay." "Sammy, don't you feel well?" setting her wheel back against the wall. "Yes, ma'am, I'm well." "What makes you sit there so still, then?" "I don't know, ma'am." "I don't believe you feel very well: you've been through a good deal this day, and you needn't go to milking. I'll milk: the cows don't give a great mess now." Scarcely had his mother left the threshold than Sammy, jumping up, turned the wheel over flat on the floor, with the pointed end of the spindle uppermost. He put a log under the post of the wheel to keep the end of the spindle from touching the floor, and prevent its turning. There was a basket of turnips sitting in the corner: he sliced the top from one of them, to flatten it, and stuck it on the end of the spindle, and getting on his knees turned the wheel round; and round went both spindle and turnip. "There!" said he talking to himself, "if that turnip was a round piece of wood, and if there was clay on it, 'twould be the same thing as the potter's wheel that Uncle Seth told about, that didn't have any crank, only two wheels." The same principle, Sammy meant. "I haven't got any tools, nor any thing to make a wheel of: so I couldn't make one." The tears sprung to the poor boy's eyes; and hearing his mother's step on the door-stone, and not wanting to have her question him about his tears, he opened the window-shutter, leaped out, made for the hovel, and sat down there. He had left in haste; and, as Mrs. Sumerford set down her milk-pail, she saw her wheel upside down, with a turnip on the end of the spindle. "What's all this!" pulling off the turnip. "Samuel, Samuel Sumerford! Did ever anybody see or hear tell of such a boy? It's a mercy that he didn't break the wheel-head. What satisfaction could there be in turning that wheel upside down, and sticking a turnip on the spindle?"