His eldest sister wrote of him as having been, at the age of 14, “a slender boy with soft gray eyes and silky, brown hair, quick to observe, yet shrinking from notice, and sensitive to excess.” She adds, in reference to his early-developed tastes: “The first that I remember, was his intense anxiety about the expected total eclipse of the sun of June 16, 1806. He had then no instrument of his own, but watched the event from a house-top on Summer street through a telescope belonging to Mr. Francis Gray, to which, somehow, he got access. In so doing he injured his eyes and for a long time was troubled in his vision.” An elder brother writes Of him at this early period: “He was the mildest and best-tempered boy I ever knew, and his remarkable mechanical genius showed itself very early.” He adds that in devising and making bits of apparatus that boys use in their sports, William was chief among his comrades. His early apprenticeship in the clockmaking business undoubtedly gave a fortunate discipline to this natural ingenuity, by confining his experiments pretty closely to the facilities of his father’s workshop as to tools and materials. He found or made “idle time” enough before he was 15 years old to construct a reliable shop chronometer. It had to be a fixture, for lacking a suitable spring he contrived to run it by weights. When he was about 16 years of age he made a good working quadrant out of ebony and boxwood, the only materials he had. His son, G. P. Bond, wrote of this instrument, years afterwards: “It is no rude affair, but every part, especially the graduation, the most difficult of all, shows the neatness, patience, and accuracy of a practised artist. A better witness to the progress he had already made in astronomy could not be desired. It is all that the materials would admit of, and proves that he must have been, even then, irrevocably devoted to astronomy.”