students at Heidelberg are accounted badges of honor, but they cannot compare with the big scar on my left knee that came to me as the free gift of a corn-knife.  Those students wanted their scars to take home to show their mothers.  I didn’t want mine, and made every effort to conceal it, as well as the hole in my trousers.  I got my scar as a warning.  I profited by it, too, for never were there two cuts in exactly the same place.  In fact, they were widely, if not wisely, distributed.  They are the indices of the soaring sense of my youthful audacity.  And yet neither parents nor teachers ever graded my scars.

I recall quite distinctly that, at one time, I proclaimed boldly over one entire page of a copy-book, that knowledge is power, and became so enthusiastic in these numerous proclamations that I wrote on the bias, and zigzagged over the page with fine abandon.  But no teacher ever even hinted to me that the knowledge I acquired from my contest with a nest of belligerent bumblebees had the slightest connection with power.  When I groped my way home with both eyes swollen shut I was never lionized.  Indeed, no!  Anything but that!  I couldn’t milk the cows that evening, and couldn’t study my lesson, and therefore, my newly acquired knowledge was called weakness instead of power.  They did not seem to realize that my swollen face was prominent in the scheme of education, nor that bumblebees and yellow-jackets may be a means of grace.  They wanted me to be solving problems in common (sometimes called vulgar) fractions.  I don’t fight bumblebees any more, which proves that my knowledge generated power.  The emotions of my boyhood presented a scene of grand disorder, and those bumblebees helped to organize them, and to clarify and define my sense of values.  I can philosophize about a bumblebee far more judicially now than I could when my eyes were swollen shut.

I went to the town to attend a circus one day, and concluded I’d celebrate the day with eclat by getting my hair cut.  At the conclusion of this ceremony the tonsorial Beau Brummel, in the most seductive tones, suggested a shampoo.  I just couldn’t resist his blandishments, and so consented.  Then he suggested tonic, and grew quite eloquent in recounting the benefits to the scalp, and I took tonic.  I felt quite a fellow, till I came to pay the bill, and then discovered that I had but fifteen cents left from all my wealth.  That, of course, was not sufficient for a ticket to the circus, so I bought a bag of peanuts and walked home, five miles, meditating, the while, upon the problem of life.  My scalp was all right, but just under that scalp was a seething, soundless hubbub.  I learned things that day that are not set down in the books, even if I did get myself laughed at.  When I get to giving school credits for home work I shall certainly excuse the boy who has had such an experience as that from solving at least four problems in vulgar fractions, and I shall include that experience in my definition of education, too.