He went home and began with trembling fingers one day to copy it. His father had given him an outhouse with bench and tools to carry out his hobby, and soon the engine worked. He looked round to see what he could use it upon, and espied the fish-pond. So he began to pump out the water till he had pumped the whole place dry. When his father came home it was to find an empty pond, and all his fish lying dead at the bottom! And now John had to leave his beloved workshop for school in Leeds. And there it seemed as if the boy showed up quite a different side of himself. The bright, eager alertness that marked him at home or with the workmen about Austhorpe was gone. He was quiet with the boys--out of his element. He did not care for their rough play. He was like a fish out of water. Silent, shy, even stupid--the boys nicknamed him "Fooley Smeaton." But though he might be dull at school, the boy's real education was surely going on at home among his pumps and model engines, his lathes and chisels. The boyish hands had begun to do that which all through life threw over him a very spell of fascination--_to construct_--to build up. The baby fingers were learning how to use tools in a way that was to give him one day, long years after, a skill that would place him on the very top of the ladder. And all the time the young mind was pondering great mechanical principles that were by-and-by to make the name of John Smeaton famed throughout the world. So it was not to games and boyish play that he gave his spare moments, but to his workshop. When he was fifteen he could use his turning-lathe to turn wood and ivory. When he was eighteen he could handle tools as deftly and cleverly as any workman who all his life had known no other trade. When he was sixteen he left school and took his place in his father's office, and tried to bring his mind to look forward to law as his life-work. He worked conscientiously day after day, coming home at evening to spend half the night in working--making--constructing things. He had all the instincts of a born mechanic. It was almost as if he could not help it. When his father sent him to London to study law, the boy tried again to stifle his longings, and to set himself to carry out his father's wishes. But strive and struggle as he would, it was impossible to crush the desire of his heart. And so one day he sat down and wrote to his father that he could go on with law no longer. Nothing except to be a mechanic would satisfy him. His father, deeply disappointed though he was, quietly made up his mind to what could not be helped, and wrote to John that he must make his own choice.