326 His Power of Wil. [cuar. XVII. 
books, I can tell you, were about as few as my education 
was brief and homespun. 
“T thought you knew—yes, I am sure you knew—that 
any one having the mind and the will need not stick fast 
even in this world. True, he may not shine so greatly as 
if he were better polished and better educated; but he need 
not sink in the mire altogether. 
“You may very likely wonder at what I have been able 
to do—being only a poor souter,* with no one to help me, 
and but few to encourage me in my labors. Many others 
have wondered, like yourself. The only answer I can give 
to such wonderers is, that I had the wit to do the little 
that I have accomplished. 
“If what I have done by myself, unaided and alone, and 
without the help of books, surpasses the credulity of some, 
what might I not have accomplished had I obtained the 
help from others which was so often promised me! But 
that time is past, and there is no use in saying any thing 
more about it. If I suffered privations, I had only myself 
and my love of nature to blame.” 
He was sometimes told that it was his “ pride” which 
prevented him from being assisted as he should have been. 
His answer was, that he did not know any thing about 
pride. But if it consisted in not soliciting aid when in 
want, and in endeavoring to conceal his poverty even when 
in need of help, in order that the world might not know of 
the misery which himself, his wife, and his family suffered, 
then he did not hesitate to say that he and his wife were 
proud. -They never refused a kindly gift, but they always 
refused public charity. ' 
“Although,” he says in a recent letter, “I have not 
known the pangs of want for some time, thanks to my 
children, I could scarcely have failed to do. so in the years 
that are past: it would have been beyond the common run 
* “ Souter, a shoemaker. Ne sutor, ete. 
