In the glad, tumultuous excitement of so much suddenly acquired time-wealth, I hardly knew what to do with it.  I first thought of going on with my reading, but the zero weather would make a fire necessary, and it occurred to me that father might object to the cost of firewood that took time to chop.  Therefore, I prudently decided to go down cellar, and begin work on a model of a self-setting sawmill I had invented.  Next morning I managed to get up at the same gloriously early hour, and though the temperature of the cellar was a little below the freezing point, and my light was only a tallow candle the mill work went joyfully on.  There were a few tools in a corner of the cellar,—­a vise, files, a hammer, chisels, etc., that father had brought from Scotland, but no saw excepting a coarse crooked one that was unfit for sawing dry hickory or oak.  So I made a fine-tooth saw suitable for my work out of a strip of steel that had formed part of an old-fashioned corset, that cut the hardest wood smoothly.  I also made my own bradawls, punches, and a pair of compasses, out of wire and old files.

My workshop was immediately under father’s bed, and the filing and tapping in making cogwheels, journals, cams, etc., must, no doubt, have annoyed him, but with the permission he had granted in his mind, and doubtless hoping that I would soon tire of getting up at one o’clock, he impatiently waited about two weeks before saying a word.  I did not vary more than five minutes from one o’clock all winter, nor did I feel any bad effects whatever, nor did I think at all about the subject as to whether so little sleep might be in any way injurious; it was a grand triumph of will-power over cold and common comfort and work-weariness in abruptly cutting down my ten hours’ allowance of sleep to five.  I simply felt that I was rich beyond anything I could have dreamed of or hoped for.  I was far more than happy.  Like Tam o’ Shanter I was glorious, “O’er a’ the ills o’ life victorious.”

Father, as was customary in Scotland, gave thanks and asked a blessing before meals, not merely as a matter of form and decent Christian manners, for he regarded food as a gift derived directly from the hands of the Father in heaven.  Therefore every meal to him was a sacrament requiring conduct and attitude of mind not unlike that befitting the Lord’s Supper.  No idle word was allowed to be spoken at our table, much less any laughing or fun or story-telling.  When we were at the breakfast-table, about two weeks after the great golden time-discovery, father cleared his throat preliminary, as we all knew, to saying something considered important.  I feared that it was to be on the subject of my early rising, and dreaded the withdrawal of the permission he had granted on account of the noise I made, but still hoping that, as he had given his word that I might get up as early as I wished, he would as a Scotchman stand to it, even though it was given in an unguarded moment and taken in a sense unreasonably far-reaching.  The solemn sacramental silence was broken by the dreaded question:—­