In the biography of Frederick Douglas[45] we are told that when he was about thirteen he began to feel deeply the moral yoke of slavery and to seek means of escaping it. He became interested in religion, was converted, and dreamed of and prayed for liberty. With great ingenuity he extracted knowledge of the alphabet and reading from white boys of his acquaintance. At sixteen, under a brutal master he revolted and was beaten until he was faint from loss of blood, and at seventeen he fought and whipped the brutal overseer Covey, who would have invoked the law, which made death the punishment for such an offense, but for shame of having been worsted by a negro boy and from the reflection that there was no profit from a dead slave. Only at twenty did he escape into the new world of freedom.
Jacob Riis[46] "fell head over heels in love with sweet Elizabeth" when he was fifteen and she thirteen. His "courtship proceeded at a tumultuous pace, which first made the town laugh, then put it out of patience and made some staid matrons express the desire to box my ears soundly." She played among the lumber where he worked, and he watched her so intently that he scarred his shinbone with an adze he should have been minding. He cut off his forefinger with an ax when she was dancing on a beam near by, and once fell off a roof when craning his neck to see her go round a corner. At another time he ordered her father off the dance-floor, because he tried to take his daughter home a few minutes before the appointed hour of midnight. Young as he was, he was large and tried to run away to join the army, but finally went to Copenhagen to serve his apprenticeship with a builder, and here had an interview with Hans Christian Andersen.
Ellery Sedgwick tells as that at thirteen the mind of Thomas Paine ran on stories of the sea which his teacher had told him, and that he attempted to enlist on the privateer _Terrible_. He was restless at home for years, and shipped on a trading vessel at nineteen.
Indeed, modern literature in our tongue abounds in this element, from "Childe Harold" to the second and third long chapters in Mrs. Ward's "David Grieve," ending with his engagement to Lucy Purcell; Thackeray's Arthur Pendennis and his characteristic love of the far older and scheming Fanny Fotheringay; David in James Lane Allen's "Reign of Law," who read Darwin, was expelled from the Bible College and the church, and finally was engaged to Gabriella; and scores more might be enumerated. There is even Sonny,[47] who, rude as he was and poorly as he did in all his studies, at the same age when he began to keep company, "tallered" his hair, tied a bow of ribbon to the buggy whip, and grew interested in manners, passing things, putting on his coat and taking off his hat at table, began to study his menagerie of pet snakes, toads, lizards, wrote John Burroughs, helped him and got help in return, took to observing, and finally wrote a book about the forest and its occupants, all of which is very _bien trouvé_ if not historic truth.