But after all, Robert seems not to have cared very greatly for his books. His delight lay in visiting the machine-shops of the town, where he spent all his spare time in trying to make things he needed or wanted. One day he explained his late arrival at school by saying that he had been at Nicholas Miller’s shop making a lead-pencil—“the best I ever had,” he declared. He had pounded out the lead and fitted it so neatly into a wooden case that Caleb Johnson admitted it was indeed an excellent pencil. Within a few days,—so eager are children to follow a leader,—all the boys had made for themselves, with more or less success, pencils like Robert’s. Sometimes his plans for making things so filled his thoughts that he dreamed over his books and was unprepared for recitation; then Caleb Johnson, after the stern fashion of those days, called him to the desk and bade him hold forth his hand for a whipping by the ferule. Once, when the teacher thought him particularly idle, he struck Robert sharply over the knuckles, saying, “There, that will make you do something!” The boy, roused by a sense of injustice, replied with politeness yet with reproof: “Sir, I came here to have something beaten into my brains, and not into my knuckles.” With head held high and arms folded, he walked back to his place, seeming even to Caleb Johnson, at the time, “a strange boy.” When Robert’s mother called at the school to talk over her son’s progress—for she was worried at his giving so little attention to his books—the master replied, “Robert says his head is so full of original ideas that there is no room in his brain to store away the contents of dusty books.” He was beginning to consider life’s problems and he dared to try to solve them by ways of his own. He was never really idle, for two absorbing interests claimed attention,—the study of machinery and the study of art. For it was not very long before that lead-pencil, pounded with such care at Nicholas Miller’s store, began to reveal Robert’s talent for drawing. He sketched parts of machinery in the various shops of the village and made himself so useful to the mechanics that they welcomed his visits. Then, as Robert realized the beauties in nature, his black pencil seemed to disappoint him. He could find no paints or crayons at the shops, and it was not until a playfellow brought a box of paints to school that Robert realized the possibility of such an aid to making pictures. He pleaded with his friend for a share that he might try his hand at mixing colors, so it was agreed that each boy should paint a picture on a mussel shell. The result proved Robert so excellent an artist that his generous schoolmate, whose talents lay in another direction, presented Robert with the entire outfit. His delight knew no bounds, and thereafter he never was at a loss for occupation.