Why should not
autograph letters from famous persons be of equal service in his
struggle for self-education? Not simple autographs--they were
meaningless; but actual letters which might tell him something useful.
It never occurred to the boy that these men might not answer him.
So he took his _Encyclopaedia_--its trustworthiness now established in
his mind by General Garfield's letter---and began to study the lives of
successful men and women. Then, with boyish frankness, he wrote on
some mooted question in one famous person's life; he asked about the
date of some important event in another's, not given in the
_Encyclopaedia_; or he asked one man why he did this or why some other
man did that.
Most interesting were, of course, the replies. Thus General Grant
sketched on an improvised map the exact spot where General Lee
surrendered to him; Longfellow told him how he came to write
"Excelsior"; Whittier told the story of "The Barefoot Boy"; Tennyson
wrote out a stanza or two of "The Brook," upon condition that Edward
would not again use the word "awful," which the poet said "is slang for
'very,'" and "I hate slang.
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