“I found my talk was not disagreeable to her.  But she was an honest girl, and didn’t want to deceive nobody.  She told me she was engaged to her cousin, a son of the old Quaker.  This news was worse to me than war, pestilence, or famine.  But still I know’d I could not help myself.  I saw quick enough my cake was dough; and I tried to cool off as fast as possible.  But I had hardly safety pipes enough, as my love was so hot as mighty nigh to burst my boilers.  But I didn’t press my claims any more, seeing there was no chance to do anything.”

David’s grief was very sincere, and continued as long as is usually the case with disappointed lovers.

David soon began to cherish some slight idea of the deficiency in his education.  He had never been to school but four days; and in that time he had learned absolutely nothing.  A young man, a Quaker, had opened a school about a mile and a half from Mr. Kennedy’s.  David made an arrangement with his employer by which he was to go to school four days in the week, and work the other two days for his board.  He continued in this way for six months.  But it was very evident that David was not born for a scholar.  At the end of that time he could read a little in the first primer.  With difficulty he could make certain hieroglyphics which looked like his name.  He could also perform simple sums in addition, subtraction, and multiplication.  The mysteries of division he never surmounted.

This was the extent of his education.  He left school, and in the laborious life upon which he entered, never after improved any opportunity for mental culture.  The disappointment which David had encountered in his love affair, only made him more eager to seek a new object upon which he might fix his affections.  Not far from Mr. Kennedy’s there was the cabin of a settler, where there were two or three girls.  David had occasionally met them.  Boy as he was, for he was not yet eighteen, he suddenly and impetuously set out to see if he could not pick, from them, one for a wife.

Without delay he made his choice, and made his offer, and was as promptly accepted as a lover.  Though they were both very young, and neither of them had a dollar, still as those considerations would not have influenced David in the slightest degree, we know not why they where not immediately married.  Several months of very desperate and satisfactory courtship passed away, when the time came for the nuptials of the little Quaker girl, which ceremony was to take place at the cabin of her uncle David and his “girl” were invited to the wedding.  The scene only inflamed the desires of David to hasten his marriage-day.  He was very importunate in pressing his claims.  She seemed quite reluctant to fix the day, but at last consented; and says David, “I thought if that day come, I should be the happiest man in the created world, or in the moon, or anywhere else.”