ABSTRACT
He made a new start in November, 1837, when he went away from home again for another try at private tutoring. He was fifteen and a half. Not so very different from what he had been, but no longer a child. He wrote of this time, "I was nominally the pupil of a topographical engineer but really for the most part given over to a decently restrained vagabond life, generally pursued under the guise of an angler, a fowler or a dabbler on the shallowest shores of the deep sea of the natural sciences."5 His teacher was Frederick A. Barton, a minister who had been a civil engineer. Almost by chance, the pupil learned at least the rudiments of skills which would serve him in a profession which did not as yet exist in his country and which he had no idea that he would one day practice. He learned surveying. He played at laying out towns on paper.6 It seemed not quite serious, and his energiesencouraged because his eyes were bad-went into hunting, fishing, skating, walking, and looking. However, he exercised the eye that was to judge the line and texture of scenery.
