How To Do It by Edward Everett Hale

When I was a very young man, I had occasion to travel two hundred miles down the valley of the Connecticut River. I had just finished a delightful summer excursion in the service of the State of New Hampshire as a geologist, -- and I left the other geological surveyors at Haverhill.

I remembered John Ledyard. Do you, dear Young America? John Ledyard, having determined to leave Dartmouth College, built himself a boat, or digged for himself a canoe, and sailed down on the stream reading the Greek Testament, or "Plutarch's Lives," I forget which, on the way.