But his out-of-school education all this time went on apace. The narrative continues:
I always had an active life and pursuits out of school, when any leisure was left me. We had ample play-ground near my father's brewery. My brother Abram was only a few years older than I. He was very clever at all boyish games, tricks, and small mischiefs; full of fun; a builder of rabbit-houses, and keeper of rabbits; passionately addicted to brass cannons and pistols, and the use of gunpowder in all its forms; and I followed him, a willing pupil. There were a number of boys, sons of workingmen, living in the neighborhood, who formed our companions in play; but no boys of the genteeler classes were within our reach, the brewery lying close to Westport and Grassmarket, and far from the new town. I too built a rabbit-house, and bought a pair of rabbits, which soon had a numerous progeny. The procuring food for them and cleaning their house were occupations, and the warm attachment I felt toward them was a source of great gratification. On two occasions, however, I grossly mismanaged them—one culpably, the other through kindness ill-directed, but both leading to results from which I subsequently drew instruction. The first fault was neglecting to clean their habitation. Under the pressure of other duties I neglected this one, and merely covered over the old litter with fresh straw. In the course of time the female killed her young, and the buck was savage. This infanticide occurred again and again, and, true to the spirit of the age, I held up the slaughtered young before the mother's eyes and beat her well, but did not clean her bed. At last, when I resumed the discharge of my own duty, her aberration ceased; but at that time I saw no connection between my own misconduct and hers. Many years later the study of physiology revealed to me my sin, and carried instruction with it. The organism of the animal was injured and rendered miserable by the dirt, and nervous irritability, akin to insanity, was the result. This example I subsequently applied to the case of the human poor, and saw in the deleterious physical condition in which many of them habitually live the cause of some of their sufferings and crimes.
In the other instance, my compassion was moved by the supposed sufferings of my pets from intensely cold weather; and I obtained leave from my father to transfer them from the house I had built for them, with the earth for their floor, to a loft having a deal floor and thoroughly inclosed and roofed. It had only a glimmer of light through panes of thick glass inserted here and there among the tiles. To my great distress the rabbits grew sick, lost their hair; their eyes became impaired; they lost their appetite, and the buck became so miserable that I took him out to the garden, tied him to a stake, and tried my skill in marking by standing at a distance of fifteen or twenty paces and shooting him with my pistol loaded with a single ball. The ball broke his spine, and he uttered a piercing scream. The cry struck so deep into my moral nature that it overwhelmed me with pain, shame, and remorse at the time, and has never lost its character in my memory since.
Long afterward I discovered that these sufferings of my beloved rabbits were the consequences of my having, through mistaken kindness, placed them in circumstances at variance with their nature. The ground was their native floor; their fur protected them from the cold; and abundance of air and light, which they enjoyed in their habitation which I had made for them, were indispensable to their well-being: and these were all wanting in the lofts. The instruction I drew from these occurrences was that, without knowledge of the structure and functions of a living organism, and its relations to the natural
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