A MARKED BOY | AdventAI

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · May 20, 1889

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 15, No. 19.

A MARKED BOY.

YEARS ago there lived in the interior of New York a boy, the son of a farmer, who also worked at the trade of a potter. The boy was a marked youth, because he did with might whatever he undertook. He was a leader in the ordinary sports of boyhood, and, whenever the farm or the pottery relaxed their hold upon him, he would be found repairing some damaged article or devising a new implement.

His father was poor, the farm was small and could only be enlarged by clearing up the primeval forest. The boy was anxious to acquire knowledge, but his services were so necessary to his father that he could not be spared to attend the winter term of the common school. But the boy was in earnest. With the aid of his brother, one year his junior, he chopped and cleared four acres of birch and maple woodland, plowed it, planted it with corn, harvested the corn, and then asked, as his compensation, to be allowed to attend school during winter. Of course the father granted the wish.

When the boy was seventeen the father's pottery business had so increased as to demand a more extensive factory. A carpenter was hired to build the new building, and the boy assisted him. So familiar did he become with the tools and trade that he determined, with the aid of the younger brother, to erect a two-story frame dwelling-house for his father's family.

The two boys cut the timber from the forest, planned and framed the structure, and then invited the neighbors to assist at the "raising." They came from far and near to see what a lad of seventeen had done. When every mortise and tenon was found to fit in its place and the frame was seen to stand perfect and secure, the veterans cheered the young architect and builder. From that day he was in demand as a master-carpenter.

That boy was Ezra Cornell, the founder of Cornell University.—Evangelical Messenger.