jumble. My resolve to go to college was clinched then and there, and that hill
will always remain my Pisgah and Moriah, Horeb and Sinai all in one. I paced
back and forth in the wind and shouted, 'I will make people know and revere me;
I will do something'; and called everything to witness my vow that I never again
would visit this spot till all was fulfilled." "Alas!" he says, "I have never been
there since. Once, to a summer party who went, I made excuse for not keeping
this rendezvous. It was too sacramental. Certainly it was a very deep and never-
to-be-forgotten experience there all alone, when something of great moment to
me certainly took place in my soul."
In the biography of Frederick Douglas[45] we are told that when he was about
thirteen he began to feel deeply the moral yoke of slavery and to seek means of
escaping it. He became interested in religion, was converted, and dreamed of and
prayed for liberty. With great ingenuity he extracted knowledge of the alphabet
and reading from white boys of his acquaintance. At sixteen, under a brutal
master he revolted and was beaten until he was faint from loss of blood, and at
seventeen he fought and whipped the brutal overseer Covey, who would have
invoked the law, which made death the punishment for such an offense, but for
shame of having been worsted by a negro boy and from the reflection that there
was no profit from a dead slave. Only at twenty did he escape into the new world
of freedom.
Jacob Riis[46] "fell head over heels in love with sweet Elizabeth" when he was
fifteen and she thirteen. His "courtship proceeded at a tumultuous pace, which
first made the town laugh, then put it out of patience and made some staid
matrons express the desire to box my ears soundly." She played among the
lumber where he worked, and he watched her so intently that he scarred his
shinbone with an adze he should have been minding. He cut off his forefinger
with an ax when she was dancing on a beam near by, and once fell off a roof
when craning his neck to see her go round a corner. At another time he ordered
her father off the dance-floor, because he tried to take his daughter home a few
minutes before the appointed hour of midnight. Young as he was, he was large
and tried to run away to join the army, but finally went to Copenhagen to serve
his apprenticeship with a builder, and here had an interview with Hans Christian
Andersen.
Ellery Sedgwick tells as that at thirteen the mind of Thomas Paine ran on stories
of the sea which his teacher had told him, and that he attempted to enlist on the
privateer Terrible. He was restless at home for years, and shipped on a trading