Chance is a better schoolmaster than design. All boys have a taste for tent life, and healthy youngsters not quite grown, with ostrich digestions, passing through the nomadic stage, revel in hardships and count it a joy to sleep on the ground where they can look up at the stars, and eat out of a skillet. A little later we find Alfred working for his elder brother in an architect's office, gazing abstractedly out of the window betimes, and wishing he were a ground-squirrel, fancy free on the heath and amid the heather, digging holes, thus avoiding introspection. "Houses are prisons," he said, and sang softly to himself the song of the open road. I think I know exactly how Alfred Russel Wallace then felt, from the touchstone of my own experience; and I think I know how he looked, too, all confirmed by an East Aurora incident. Some years ago, one fine day in May, I was helping excavate for the foundation of a new barn. All at once I felt that some one was standing behind me looking at me. I turned around and there was a tall, lithe, slender youth in a faded college cap, blue flannel shirt, ragged trousers and top-boots. My first impression of him was that he was a fellow who slept in his clothes, a plain "Weary," but when he spoke there was a note of self-reliance in his low, well-modulated voice that told me he was no mendicant. Voice is the true index of character. "My name is Wallace, and I have a note to you from my father," and he began diving into pockets, and finally produced a ragged letter that was nearly worn out through long contact with a perspiring human form divine--or partially so. I seldom make haste about reading letters of introduction, and so I greeted the young man with a word of welcome, and gave him a chance to say something for himself. He was English, that was very sure--and Oxford English at that. "You see," he began, "I am working just now over on the Hamburg and Buffalo Electric Line, stringing wires. I get three dollars a day because I'm a fairly good climber. I wanted to learn the business, so I just hired out as a laborer, and they gave me the hardest job, thinking to scare me out, but that was what I wanted," and he smiled modestly and showed a set of incisors as fine and strong as a dog's teeth. "I want to remain with you for a week and pay for my board in work," he cautiously continued. "But about your father, Mr. Wallace--do I know him?" "I think so; he has written you several letters--Alfred Russel Wallace!" You could have knocked me down with a lady's-slipper. I opened the letter and unmistakably it was from the great scientist, "introducing my baby boy."