Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. SAM FORBES. Sam Forbes was born in Ohio, February 29, at three o'clock A.m., in the village of Rouseville, situated on the banks of the Ohio River, near Maysville, Ky. The boys of the place considered themselves rich if they could ever manage to accumulate and have on hand at one and the same time as much as two cents; but when Sam was nine years old he broke the village record by gathering into his possession the sum of nine cents, thus winning no small fame among his comrades as a capitalist. He chanced at that time to overhear a conversation between two farmers to the effect that during that season nearly every man in the county was going to try the experiment of raising hops, as the soil and climate had been pronounced adapted for their production. Sam had never seen hops grow, and being of an inquisitive turn of mind, he asked his mother about it, who explained all the particulars she knew regarding the subject. Sam had the habit of never forgetting anything he ever heard, and when his mother had finished, her information was securely and forever fastened somewhere in his brain, but without anythought on his part that he would ever be able to make use of what he had heard. But the next day, while playing with a crowd of boys at the river bank, he saw floating down-stream a vast quantity of hoop-poles, that had been lost from a flat-boat, which had sunk forty miles above. There was such a quantity of them that they immediately attracted Sam's attention, and he happened to remember his mother had said that hops had to twine or grow around poles that were stuck in the ground, same as bean poles; so immediately taking one of the many skiffs that were drawn up on the river bank, he rowed out and gathered sixty-three poles, and then called to the other nine...