We have been especially interested in the account given of Dr. Kane's boyhood and early life. As a boy, he had too much force, originality, and decided bias of nature to be what is called a "good boy,"--one of those unfortunate children whose weakness of individuality passes for moral excellence, and who give their guardians so little trouble in the early development and so much trouble in the maturity of their mediocrity. He would not learn what he did not like, and what he felt would be of no use to him. He kept his memory free from all intellectual information which could not be transmuted into intellectual ability. The same daring, confidence, enterprise, and passion for action, which in after life made him an explorer, were first expressed in that love of mischief which vexes the hearts of parents and calls into exercise the pedagogue's ferule. All arbitrary authority found him a resolute little rebel. Dr. Elder furnishes some amusing instances of his audacity and determination. Though smaller than other boys of his age, he possessed "the clear advantage of that energy of nerve and that sort of twill in the muscular texture which give tight little fellows more size than they measure and more weight than they weigh." At school he had under his charge a brother, two years younger than himself, who was once called up by the master to be whipped. This disturbed Elisha's notions of justice and his conceptions of the duties of a guardian, and, springing from his seat, he exclaimed, "Don't whip him, he's such a little fellow!--whip me!" The master, interpreting this to be mutiny, which really was intended for fair compromise, answered, "I'll whip you, too, Sir!" Strung for endurance, the sense of injustice changed his mood to defiance, and such fight as he was able to make quickly converted the discipline into a fracas, and Elisha left the school with marks which required explanation.
In his eighteenth year he was prostrated by a disease which developed into inflammation of the lining membrane of the heart, from which he never recovered. The verdict of the physician was ever in his mind: "You may fall at any time as suddenly as from [by] a musket-shot." His life was afterwards, indeed, like the life of a soldier constantly under fire. Instead of making him a valetudinary, this continual liability to death aided to make him a hero. He acted in the spirit of his father's advice,--"If you must die, die in harness." Dr. Elder proves that his existence was prolonged by the hardihood which made him careless of death. "The current of his life shows convincingly that incessant toil and exposure was [were] a sound hygienic policy in his case. Naturally his physical constitution was a case of coil springs, compacted till they quivered with their own mobility; nervous disease had added its irritability, and mental energy electrified them. It was doing or dying, with him. And it was not a tyrant selfishness, a wild ambition, that ruled his life, but a rare concurrence of mental aptitude, moral impulse, and bodily necessity, that kept him incessant in adventure." Nothing could damp this ardor. He contracted the peculiar disease of every country and climate he visited, and was frequently on what seemed his death-bed; but no experience of physical misery had any influence in blunting his intellectual curiosity or impairing the energies of his will. One of those elastic natures "who ever with a frolic welcome take the thunder or the sunshine," his whole existence was wedded to action, and he was always ready to suffer everything, if he could thereby do anything.