previous next
[28] mother looked after him thoughtfully, and remarked to one of his sisters, ‘Isaac is no common boy.— He will do something great, either for good or evil.’ She called him back and said, ‘My son, you are now going forth to make your own way in the world. Always remember that you are as good as any other person; but remember also that you are no better.’ With this farewell injunction, he departed for Philadelphia, where he soon acquired the character of a faithful and industrious apprentice.

But his boyish love of fun was still strong within him, and he was the torment of all his fellow apprentices. One of them, named William Roberts, proposed that they should go together into the cellar to steal a pitcher of cider. Isaac pulled the spile, and while William was drawing the liquor, he took an unobserved opportunity to hide it. When the pitcher was full, he pretended to look all around for it, without being able to find it. At last, he told his unsuspecting comrade that he must thrust his finger into the hole and keep it there, while he went to get another spile. William waited and waited for him to return, but when an hour or more had elapsed, his patience was exhausted, and he began to Halloo!— The noise, instead of bringing Isaac to his assistance, brought the mistress of the house, who caught the culprit at the cider-barrel, and gave him a severe

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
William Roberts (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: