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88 began to distinguish himself, at once, by a sort of harmless eccentricity of character and deportment. He was peculiarly kind and devoted to animals— which is not particularly a sign of eccentricity—but he gave almost all of his spending money to the poor—which is, perhaps, eccentricity carried to an extreme! He drank nothing but water; he lived sparingly; he boxed with everybody who came along; he studied philosophy; and he left college at the end of three years, without a degree, to begin, in rather an unusual way, the active practice of the philosophy he had studied. He believed that the natural woman was not the proper mate for a philosopher of his kind; and he set himself out to make a wife for himself, selecting from an orphan asylum a young girl of twelve for the experiment. The experiment was not a success! He began her education, physical, mental, and moral, upon purely philosophical principles. But she screamed, and she persisted in screaming, when, in order to quiet her nerves, he fired pistols at her legs, and dropped boiling sealing-wax down her neck; which proved that she lacked the qualities of a Stoic. She betrayed the secrets which were told to her in order that her reticence might be tested; which showed that she was not to be trusted. And, worst of all, she cared naught for science or literature. So he married her to some