In spite of his skill in these different lines, Robert was not a very successful scholar, and his poor schoolteacher, who was a strict Quaker of Tory principles, found him very hard to put up with at certain times. If some inventive idea occurred to the boy while he was on his way to school, he was quite as likely to stop and work it out as not. One time he came in so very late that the teacher quite lost his patience. Seizing a rod he told Robert to hold out his hand, and gave him a caning. "There!" he exclaimed, "I hope that will make you do something." But the boy folded his arms and answered very quietly, "I came to school to have something beaten into my brains and not into my knuckles." It was very hard for the teacher to do much with such a lad, particularly as the boy was so often really very helpful to him. Another time when he came to school late, he had been at a shop pouring lead into wooden pencils that were better than those he had made before, and he handed several of them to the master. The man examined them carefully and said they were the best he had ever had. It was hard to scold the boy for spending his time in such ways. One time, when the teacher had tried to rouse his ambition to study history, Robert said to him: "My head's so full of original notions that there's no vacant room to store away the records of dusty old books." Yet in spite of these stories, the boy could not help picking up a great deal of general information at school, for his mind was always alert, and he was eager to improve on everything that had been done before. At this time in his boyhood it was hard to say whether the young Fulton was more the inventor or the artist, but as soon as the war ended he decided that he would become a painter, and went to Philadelphia, then the chief city of the new nation, to study his art. He made enough money by the use of his pencil and by making drawings for machinists to support himself, and also saved enough money to buy a small farm for his widowed mother and younger brothers and sisters. Benjamin West, the great painter, had lived near Lancaster, and had heard much of Robert Fulton's boyhood inventions, and he now hunted him out in Philadelphia, and helped him in his new line of work. The young artist met Benjamin Franklin and found him eager to aid him in his plans, and so, by his perseverance and the friends he was fortunate enough to make, he laid the foundations for his future. When he became a man, the spirit of the inventor finally overcame that of the painter. He went abroad and studied in laboratories in England and France, and then he came home and built a workshop of his own. What particularly interested him was the uses to which steam might be put, and he studied its possibilities until he had worked out his plans for a practical steamboat. How successful those plans were all the world knows.