quently might consider that every day he spent in school cost him that sum of money. This reflection made him doubly industrious. After this half-year's study, in the spring he found himself well versed in mathematics; he had gone through Virgil in Latin, and had read several French works; he was therefore well satisfied with himself, and returned again to the forge, determined to make up for lost time. To accomplish this thoroughly he engaged to do the work of two men, and thus received double wages. Severe as this labour was, and requiring fourteen hours of each day, he still found time to read a little of Virgil, or a few pages of French, morning or evening.

He, at this time, also first began to look into Spanish ; which, to his delight, he found he could read without much difficulty. During this summer he conceived the idea of making himself acquainted with Greek. He procured, therefore, a Greek grammar; a little book, which would just lie in the crown of his straw hat, and which he thus carried with him to his work, which was the casting of brass cow-bells in a couple of furnaces, which he had to watch with no small attention. Whilst standing over these, waiting for the fusing of the metal, he would take out his little grammar, and commit part of a Greek verb to memory. Thus he worked on, with head and hands, until autumn. But autumn brought self-dissatisfaction; for he beheld immense continents of Knowledge lying before him, untracked and undiscovered; so he left his furnaces, determined to appropriate his earnings to the pursuit of knowledge. During the winter he went to New Haven, and took lodgings at an inn; and here, as Mary Howitt says, from whose memoir of him we have principally extracted these particulars here, his intellectual labour during the winter appears to have been miraculous. The following was his course of daily study :

As soon as the man who attended to the fires had made one in the sitting-room, which was at about half-past four in the morning,

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I rose, and studied German till breakfast, which was served at halfpast seven. When the boarders were gone to their places of business I sat down to Homer's Iliad, without a note or a comment to assist me, and with a Greek and Latin lexicon. A few minutes before the people came in to their dinners I put away all my Greek and Latin, and began reading Italian, which was less calculated to attract the notice of the noisy men who at that hour thronged the room. After dinner I took a short walk, and then again sat down to Homer's Iliad, with a determination to master it, without a master. The proudest moment of my life was when I first possessed myself of the full meaning of the first fifteen lines of that noble work. I took a triumphal walk in celebration of that exploit. In the evening I read in the Spanish language until bedtime. I followed this course for two or three months, at the end of which time I read about the whole of the Iliad in Greek, and made considerable progress in French, Italian, German, and Spanish.

When the winter was over, he returned again to New Britain, girded on his leather apron, and again resolved to "make up lost time." The fame of his learning, however, had travelled before him, and he was requested to undertake the management of a grammar-school in a neighbouring town. This post he occupied for a year, attending no less sedulously to his own studies than to those of his pupils. At the end of this time, however, his health suffered from the confinement, and from the want of that vigorous exercise to which he had been accustomed, and he was compelled to give up his school.

He betook himself again to the forge and the lexicon, for he was determined to attain yet more knowledge. The Oriental dialects were yet unlearned. The difficulty was to obtain books to prosecute his studies, and the idea entered his mind of coming to Europe, and working his passage over, in order that he might obtain books, which it seemed not possible to obtain in the United States: he then started and walked to Boston, a distance of a hundred and twenty miles. He heard of an Antiquarian Library, at Worcester;

But

thither he determined to go, and find work as a journeyman, in order that he might be able to read in the library. a feeling of unwonted depression came over him; he was exhausted in body by fatigue, lame, and reduced in finances to one dollar and a watch. He limped along the streets of the city. As he was about to leave it, feeling himself poor, and weak and mean, in comparison with the very walls of the houses, which, as he glanced up to them, looked, as he has been heard to say, to him like the walls of the New Jerusalem. When he reached Boston Bridge, on his way to Worcester, he was overtaken by a waggon, which a boy was driving. On inquiry he found that the boy was going to Worcester, and was willing to take him there, as he requested. This was a great God-send to his weary frame, for it was forty miles to that town. Arrived at the end of the journey, he counselled with himself as to the payment which he should make the boy for the ride. The dollar, which was available money, he could not part with; he offered him, therefore, the old watch, telling him of its present useless condition, but that as he could perhaps afford to have it mended, it might be worth more than even the ride; and if he found it so, at some future time he might give him the difference. The boy accepted the watch on these terms, and so they parted for that time; Burritt very soon engaging himself as a journeyman blacksmith, at the low rate of twelve dollars a month, with board. To pursue the little history of the watch, we must say, that a few weeks after he had been thus engaged, the boy entered the shop one day when he was at work at the anvil, and with a smiling countenance handed him a few dollars, which he considered due to him out of the watch; it had been mended, he said, and was then going cleverly. This was a pleasant surprise, but a farther surprise remained. During the very last year, when Burritt happened to be travelling from Worcester to New Britain by railway, he was familiarly and kindly accosted by a handsome, well-dressed young man, his fellow-traveller. "You have forgotten me, Mr.

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Burritt," said he, "but I have not forgotten you." Burritt asked for information to assist his recognition. "You remember," returned the other, "the boy to whom you gave the watch. I am he; a young man now, a student of Harvard College." It was a pleasant meeting; the warmest hands-shaking followed. "And about that watch," said Burritt, "what has become of it? for, to tell you the truth, I was much attached to it, and should like to have it back again.” “That you shall," replied the young man, "you

shall have it back.

I

sold it; but I know where it is, and it shall be yours." The watch soon became Burritt's again; and, as he told us with pride, for some time hung in his printing office.

We now return to Burritt working for his twelve dollars a month. A very little time sufficed to show him that the antiquarian library at Worcester could be of little or no use to him, and this discovery filled him with deep sorrow. The library was open to the public but a certain number of hours in the day, and these were the very hours when his duties as a journeyman-smith confined him to the anvil. He continued, therefore, his Hebrew studies unassisted, as he was best able. Every moment which he could steal out of the four-and-twenty hours was devoted to study; he rose early in the winter mornings, and while the mistress of the house was preparing breakfast by lamp-light, he would stand by the mantlepiece, with his Hebrew Bible on the shelf, and his lexicon in his hand, thus studying while he ate; the same method was pursued at the other meals; mental and bodily food being taken in together. This severe labour of mind, as might be expected, produced serious effects on his health; he suffered much from headaches, the characteristic remedy for which were two or three additional hours of hard forging, and a little less study. We will copy from his diary of this date one week's work, as a specimen of the whole, and our readers may then judge of the gigantic labours of this Titan of learning.

Monday, June 18, headache; forty pages Cuvier's Theory of