Explore "The Story of my Boyhood and Youth" by John Muir on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Hungry for Knowledge-Borrowing Books-Paternal Opposition-Snatched Moments-Early Rising proves a Way out of Difficulties-The Cellar Workshop-Inventions-An Early-Rising Machine-Novel Clocks-Hygrometers, etc. -A Neighbor's Advice.
I learned arithmetic in Scotland without understanding any of it, though I had the rules by heart. But when I was about fifteen or sixteen years of age, I began to grow hungry for real knowledge, and persuaded father, who was willing enough to have me study provided my farm work was kept up, to buy me a higher arithmetic. Beginning at the beginning, in one summer I easily finished it without assistance, in the short intervals between the end of dinner and the afternoon start for the harvest-and hay-fields, accomplishing more without a teacher in a few scraps of time than in years in school before my mind was ready for such work. Then in succession I took up algebra, geometry, and trigonometry and made some little progress in each, and reviewed grammar.