Annals of our ancestors; one hundred and fifty years of history in the ...

CHILDHOOD OF B. U. WATKINS 31
the box sent from New York was a silver watch, which father
carried till past middle .ige. We doubt not that it was through
his teacher he was introduced to Woodward High School, one
of the first schools for classic learning in Cincinnati. In this
institution began his life as a regular student. He boarded
where the fare was both poor and scant, but nothing was
accounted too hard that led to the place he wished to be. The
environments were such as introduced him to the early edu-
cators; the mathematician, Joseph Ray, became his lifelong
friend; also D. S. Burnett, scholar, educator, and a preacher of
the Christian Church, a man of superior culture who had a
young ladies' seminary not far from Mt. Healthy, known as
Hygeia. John A. Gano, a man of note, as well as other leaders
whom he met at Woodward High School or through its influence,
helped to broaden his ideas of the world of books and
of true culture.
Thus our father pursued his studies with interest and
enthusiasm, while all this time our grandparents thought how
strange it was that Ben wanted to study Latin and Greek and
read history and poetry, which to them seemed to have no
practical bearing on life or to be of any real value. The
fences had to be built, and many were the rails to be split to
make these barriers against the neighbors' stock; flax had to
be hatcheled and a thousand and one things done to help
make the new home a place of comfort. They had serious
fears that higher education tended to produce undutiful sons,
who would forsake their old parents. We feel that our father
deserves something more than ordinary commendation for the
persistence he showed in the pursuit of knowledge, handicapped
as he was not only by the spirit of his time but by his blind-
ness. The former was probably harder to bear than the latter;
but we must remember that the immediate forbears of the
people of his generation were the men and women who had
subdued the forest by main strength and had found every
moment of their waking hours filled with exhausting labors.
There was little time to read, and it was thought quite unnecessary
for the mothers of the pioneers to learn to write, for
what time had a woman for scribbling nonsense? She might