Hugh became absorbed in the notion of inventing a machine that would do the
work he had seen the men doing in the field. All day he thought about it.
The notion once fixed in his mind gave him something tangible to work upon.
In the study of mechanics, taken up in a purely amateur spirit, he had
not gone far enough to feel himself capable of undertaking the actual
construction of such a machine, but thought the difficulty might be
overcome by patience and by experimenting with combinations of wheels,
gears and levers whittled out of pieces of wood. From Hunter's Jewelry
Store he got a cheap clock and spent days taking it apart and putting it
together again. He dropped the doing of mathematical problems and sent away
for books describing the construction of machines. Already the flood of new
inventions, that was so completely to change the methods of cultivating the
soil in America, had begun to spread over the country, and many new and
strange kinds of agricultural implements arrived at the Bidwell freight
house of the Wheeling railroad. There Hugh saw a harvesting machine
for cutting grain, a mowing machine for cutting hay and a long-nosed
strange-looking implement that was intended to root potatoes out of the
ground very much after the method pursued by energetic pigs. He studied
these carefully. For a time his mind turned away from the hunger for human
contact and he was content to remain an isolated figure, absorbed in the
workings of his own awakening mind.
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