midnight
But some men are hidden fires . Fullalove was one of the extraordinary products of an extraordinary nation , the United States of America . He was an engineer for one thing , and an inventive and practical mechanician ; held two patents of his own creating , which yielded him a good income both at home and in Great Britain . Such results are seldom achieved without deep study and seclusion ; and , accordingly , Joshua Fullalove , when the inventive fit was on , would be buried deep as Archimedes for a twelvemonth , burning the midnight oil : then , his active element predominating , the pale student would dash into the forest or the prairie , with a rifle and an Indian , and come out bronzed , and more or less be-panthered or be-buffaloed ; thence invariably to sea for a year or two . There , Anglo-Saxon to the backbone , his romance had ever an eye to business ; he was always after foreign mechanical inventions -- he was now importing a excellent one from Japan -- and ready to do lucrative feats of knowledge : thus he bought a Turkish ship at the bottom of the Dardanelles for twelve hundred dollars , raised her cargo -LRB- hardware -RRB- , and sold it for six thousand dollars ; then weighed the empty ship , pumped her , repaired he ; and navigated her himself into Boston harbour , Massachusetts . On the way he rescued , with his late drowned ship , a Swedish vessel , and received salvage . He once fished eighty elephants ' tusks out of a craft foundered in the Firth of Forth , to the disgust of elder Anglo-Saxons looking on from the shore .