“The subsequent year was one in which I figured not largely, but considerably.  I made a noise in the world, and was flattered so much by my mother’s acquaintances that my nose has been what is vulgarly called ‘a pug,’ ever since.  I did n’t have my own way at all, except when I screamed.  In that I was not an Automaton.  I was myself in that particular; and the more restraint they put upon me, the more freedom I had.  I cried independently of all my aunts and cousins.  They could n’t dictate me in that.

“Years passed on, and I grew older, as a matter of course.  I grew without any consent of my own, sir, and found myself in jacket and trousers ditto.  I was sent to school, and was told to study Greek and Latin, and Algebra, and Pneumatics, and Hydrostatics, and a dozen or twenty other things, the very names of which I have forgotten, but which I well remember bothered me considerably in those days.  I had much rather have studied the laws of my own being; much rather have examined and become acquainted with the architecture of my own bodily frame; much rather have studied something more intimately connected with the realities of my own existence; but they made me study what was repulsive to my own mind, and speak big words which I did n’t understand, and which my teacher could n’t explain without the aid of a dictionary.

“My parents labored under the strange delusion that I was a wonderful child.  I don’t know why, unless it was because I did n’t know anything of life, and I could repeat a little Latin, stumble through a sentence of Greek, and, after having solved a problem seventy-six thousand times to show my wonderful precociousness, could do it again when called upon.  Perhaps I’m extravagant.  It was n’t more than half that number of times.  At any rate, sir, I was thought a prodigy—­a most astonishing intellectual—­I don’t know what,—­call it mushroom,—­because what I had done so many times I could do again.

“I recollect there was a little youngster of my acquaintance,—­a charming, flaxen-haired, blue-eyed boy,—­who told me, one day, that he did n’t care for the dead languages, he had rather know the live ones.  I thought so too, and we talked a long time, down behind old Turner’s barn, about what should be and what should n’t.  But I had to go home.  I had to be pulled about, this arm with this wire, and that foot with that wire.  I had to do this and that, to study this and study that, because-why, because I was an Automaton, sir.  I was born such.  ’T was in my bones to be an Automaton.

“My school-days passed, and the minister told my father that if he was him he’d send me to college.  He-my father-did n’t sleep any, that night.  He and my mother kept awake till daylight prognosticating my career, and fixing upon a day when I should go to Cambridge.