of the advantage of collegiate training, and yet they had risen to the top.  But how?  The boy decided to read about these men and others, and find out.  He could not, however, afford the separate biographies, so he went to the libraries to find a compendium that would authoritatively tell him of all successful men.  He found it in Appleton’s Encyclopaedia, and, determining to have only the best, he saved his luncheon money, walked instead of riding the five miles to his Brooklyn home, and, after a period of saving, had his reward in the first purchase from his own earnings:  a set of the Encyclopaedia.  He now read about all the successful men, and was encouraged to find that in many cases their beginnings had been as modest as his own, and their opportunities of education as limited.

One day it occurred to him to test the accuracy of the biographies he was reading.  James A. Garfield was then spoken of for the presidency; Edward wondered whether it was true that the man who was likely to be President of the United States had once been a boy on the tow-path, and with a simple directness characteristic of his Dutch training, wrote to General Garfield, asking whether the boyhood episode was true, and explaining why he asked.  Of course any public man, no matter how large his correspondence, is pleased to receive an earnest letter from an information-seeking boy.  General Garfield answered warmly and fully.  Edward showed the letter to his father, who told the boy that it was valuable and he should keep it.  This was a new idea.  He followed it further; if one such letter was valuable, how much more valuable would be a hundred!  If General Garfield answered him, would not other famous men?  Why not begin a collection of autograph letters?  Everybody collected something.

Edward had collected postage-stamps, and the hobby had, incidentally, helped him wonderfully in his study of geography.  Why should not autograph letters from famous persons be of equal service in his struggle for self-education?  Not simple autographs—­they were meaningless; but actual letters which might tell him something useful.  It never occurred to the boy that these men might not answer him.

So he took his Encyclopaedia—­its trustworthiness now established in his mind by General Garfield’s letter—–­and began to study the lives of successful men and women.  Then, with boyish frankness, he wrote on some mooted question in one famous person’s life; he asked about the date of some important event in another’s, not given in the Encyclopaedia; or he asked one man why he did this or why some other man did that.

Most interesting were, of course, the replies.  Thus General Grant sketched on an improvised map the exact spot where General Lee surrendered to him; Longfellow told him how he came to write “Excelsior”; Whittier told the story of “The Barefoot Boy”; Tennyson wrote out a stanza or two of “The Brook,” upon condition that Edward would not again use the word “awful,” which the poet said “is slang for ‘very,’” and “I hate slang.”