BAD BOYS BUT NOTED MEN.

Cromwell Argus, Volume L, Issue 2644, 13 October 1919, Page 7

BAD BOYS BUT NOTED MEN.

Because a boy has had a bad school record, there is no reason to suppose he is beyond hope. What, for instance, was the early record of that brilliant preacher and ablest of Scottish churchmen, Dr. Chalmers ? The man who, more than any other, influenced the church of his day, the man who rescued thousands from squalor and unhappiness, whose plans for the social betterment of the masses were attended by results hardly surpassed by the world’s foremost philanthropists, was in his early days a perfect ne’er-do-weol ; was pronounced hopeless by more teachers than one ; and in the long run was ignominiously dismissed from school , as incorrigible and worthless ! Isaac Barrow, who turned out so splendid and noble-hearted a man, was, when a boy at Charterhouse, notorious chiefly for his stormy temper, proverbial Idleness as a scholar and pugnacious habits ; and such .unhappiness did he cause his parents that his father was wont to declare that “if it‘pleased God to take from him any of his children, he hoped it would be Isaac.’’ When the Duke of Wellington was a boy he gave his mother so much trouble that on one occasion she bitterly exclaimed, when asked what his future was to be : “He had better go into the Army. A lad like that is only lit food for the bullets !’ Take again the case of Clive, the man who, according to Pitt, was a heaven-horn general, the military genius whose victory at 1 Massey is rightly esteemed one of the decisive battles of the world. There was hardly a day he was not in trouble. Years after his rise to fame and fortune, greybeards used to describe how, defiant of all authority and deaf to warnings alike of friends and advisers, lie climbed the steeple of the village church, utterly unmoved by the slightest thought of fear, though a single error might at auv moment have meant his death. ;

The velocity with which sound travels through water is more than

four times as great as through air. i As long ago as 1827 the sound of a 1 bell under water was transmitted over twenty-one miles. I