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“With such a feeling and but little chance of going to school at all, he did not become much of a scholar. He would always choose to stay at home and work hard rather than be sent to school.” Consequently, “he learned nothing of grammar, nor did he get at school so much knowledge of common arithmetic as the four ground rules.”

Almost his only reading at the age of ten was a little history to which the open bookcase of an old friend tempted him. He knew nothing of games or sports; he had few or no companions, but, “to be sent off through the wilderness alone to very considerable distances was particularly his delight.... By the time he was twelve years old he was sent off more than a hundred miles with companies of cattle.” So his soul grew apart and alone and yet untrammeled and unconfined, knowing all the depths of secret self-abasement, and the heights of confident self-will. With others he was painfully diffident and bashful, and little sins that smaller souls would laugh at and forget loomed large and awful to his heart-searching vision. John had “a very bad foolish habit.... I mean telling lies, generally to screen himself from blame or from punishment,” because “he could not well endure to be reproached and I now think had he been oftener encouraged to be entirely frank... he would not have been so often guilty of this fault, nor have been (in after life) obliged to struggle so long with so mean a habit.”