Can you imagine young people nowadays making a study of trigonometry for the fun of it? Well I did.

By the time I was in sixth grade I could bound every country in the world from memory.

To me, the noise of a threshing machine is better music than a lot of music I hear nowadays. I took a man's place in the threshing crew when I was only 14 years old.

I was interested in telescopes and the way they worked because I had an intense desire to see what things looked like, so I learned how to use telescopes and find things in the sky.

The planets are never the same twice, they're always different, so they could compare the markings I had drawn with their current photographs and they knew that I was drawing what I was really seeing and it wasn't copied from somewhere.

I used to believe there were people on Mars, and of course now we know there aren't. Mars held particular interest. I was curious what kind of beings they would look like.

I doubt that the phenomenon was any terrestrial reflection, because... nothing of the kind has ever appeared before or since... I was so unprepared for such a strange sight that I was really petrified with astonishment.