Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/363

 reading them." Already, too, the writer's ambition was fastened on him to the extent that when he told Mrs. Coon he hated grammar and she said he would have to learn grammar if he were going to write, the motivation worked.

Mrs. Coon said of the reading of this boy of 15 at the time he was in the Mt. Tabor school in 1876:

"He always carried a book in his pocket, and utilized every moment. The book was not about school work nor an amusing story, but the work of some standard author. If he were urged by his comrades to make up a team for a game, he would respond, but was eager to get back to his book. At the time he was in school he had read Milton's Paradise Lost, Scott's Lady of the Lake, some of Shakespeare's plays, some of Macaulay's writings and poems by Longfellow, Bryant, Burns and Moore. He frequently asked advice from the principal about profitable books for him to read and one time inquired what I thought of the merits of David Copperfield, and where a copy could be obtained."

The more he read books the more he was determined to write them. It was not a vague, inarticulate kind of aspiration, but he had a concrete idea of the kind of books he meant to write:

"To make Oregon as famous as Scott made Scotland; to make the Cascades as widely known as the Highlands; the Santiam like the Ayer of Tweed; to make the splendid scenery of the Willamette the background for romance full of passion and grandeur, grew more and more into the one central ambition of my life."

His mother's asthma made it necessary to move back to Goldendale. Six months was all he spent in the Mt. Tabor school, the only schooling he had until he went to the Pacific Theological Seminary at Oakland at the age of 28. The half year with Mr.