In 1874 a reporter of the Boston _Daily Traveler_ was sent to Waterford to find the living neighbors of Ward's family and write a sketch of the village and people. In the report the barest mention was made of Maude Myrick. It stated that a cousin of Ward's remembered that his early infatuation for a girl in the adjoining township "broke him all up" when she was accidentally drowned at the inlet of Norway Lake. Search for her genealogy at this late date seems vain. Ward appears never to have mentioned her name but once after her death, and that was on his own dying bed. The only allusion possibly concerning her that he ever made was a brief note in an autograph album, preserved in Portland, Maine, in which he wrote: "As for opposites; the happiest place for me is Tiffin, and the saddest is a bridge over the Norway brook." If the historian could be sure that the vague rumor was fact and that the country lass and the farmer's son were lovers, that the place of her sudden death at the bridge over the inlet to Norway Lake, halfway between their homes, was their trysting place, it would make clear the chief reason for Abraham Lincoln's tender interest in Artemus Ward. That fact would also account in a large degree for Ward's eccentric, inimitable humor. All the great humorists from Charles Lamb to Josh Billings were broken-hearted in their youth. Great geniuses have often been developed by the same sad experience. It often costs much to be truly great. Previous to his sixteenth year the life of Charles Farrar Browne was that of a New England country boy with parents who were industrious, honest, and poor. The family needs were not of the extreme kind which are found in the slums of the city, but existence depended on incessant toil and the most critical economy. Squire Browne, the father of the future "Artemus Ward," was a farmer who could also use surveying instruments with the skill of New England common sense. His mother was a strong, industrious woman of the Pilgrim Fathers stock. She encouraged home study and made the long winter evenings the occasion for moral and mental instruction. The district school was of little use to her children, as they could "outteach the teacher." But Charlie was educated beyond his years by the books which his parents brought into the home. At fifteen years of age, his father having died two years previously, he was sent to Skowhegan, Maine, to learn the trade of a printer in the office of the Skowhegan _Clarion_.