150 History of Gutta-Percha Willie,

 

know how one wheel could move another. Every-
thing he did would help his arithmetic, and geo-
graphy, and history; and these and those and all
things besides, would help him to understand
poetry.

In his Latin sentences he found the parts fit into
each other like dove-tailing ; finding the terms of
equations, he said, was like inventing machines,
and he soon grew clever at solving them. It was
not from his manual abilities alone that his father
had given him the name of Gutta-Percha Willie,
but from the fact that his mind, once warmed to
interest, could accommodate itself to the pecu-
liarities of any science, just as the gutta-percha
which is used for taking a mould fits itself to the’
outs and ins of any figure.

He still employed his water-wheel to pull him
out of bed in the middle of the night. He had, of
course, to make considerable alterations in, or
rather additions to, its machinery, after changing
his bed-room, for it had then to work in a direction
at right angles to the former; but this he managed
perfectly.

It is well for Willie’s reputation with a certain,
and that not a small class of readers, that there
was something even they would call useful in several
of his inventions and many of his efforts; in his
hydraulics, for instance, by means of which he
saved old Tibby’s limbs; in his house-building,