"What I am I have made myself," he said. "I say this without vanity, and in pure simplicity of heart." So passed the long, sunshiny days of school-time, and when he was sixteen he left school finally. After that, for one short, blissful year he shot and fished and lived chiefly in the open, surrounded by the beauties of Cornish scenery, for which in after years his heart always kept a tender memory, when the bustle and din of a city, and the whirl of city life, had well-nigh drowned for him Nature's softer tones. He grew then to know familiarly bird and beast, and rock and flower. In after years, when his life was more fully filled than most men's, a chance word or reference would seem to waft him a whiff of the sea off the Cornish shore, and a great longing would seize him for the loved scenes of his childhood. Then, in the midst of his work, he would take a hurried run home. During this year of holiday, which he enjoyed with the whole-heartedness of a careless, happy boy, he collected a number of birds, and stuffed them with his own hands--and with not a little skill. Almost to the end of life he kept his love of shooting. As in fishing he tried to efface himself and deceive the wily fish, so in shooting he was strangely beset by fear of an accident, and he would study to make himself as conspicuous as possible in a scarlet hat! Almost at the end, when his strength was failing, it is pathetic enough to find him ask to be driven to the field, that he might still fire a shot. But already over his young life there brooded its first great shadow. In 1794 his father died. It may have been this which helped to change young Humphrey from the happy, careless boy to something more serious, more thoughtful, that fixed his mind on the responsibilities life was so full of, that helped to turn it from mere sport and pleasure to the improvement of his mind--to the gaining of knowledge. At any rate, about this time the boy laid hold of life, and, as a rower in a boat-race might do, steadied down to his responsibilities. His mother apprenticed him to a surgeon and apothecary in Penzance, and straightway with that ardour and enthusiasm that carried him through so much of his great work in later life, he fell in love with chemistry. He tried boyish experiments. He used the rudest instruments--anything that he could lay hands on. Pots, pans, vessels in the surgery--nothing was safe or sacred from his touch. He filled the house with strange and hideous odours--he burnt holes in his sister's dresses. When he turned the garret into a laboratory his good old guardian would exclaim-- "This boy Humphrey is incorrigible! Was there ever so idle a dog? He will blow us all into the air." Half an hour later he would proudly and fondly call the boy "Philosopher," or "Sir Humphrey," as if already his prophetic eye pierced the future and beheld his greatness.