crooning some old melody without words, all the while gently stroking
her face against my head; many and many a night I thus fell asleep. I
can see her now, her great dark eyes looking into the fire, to where?
No one knew but her. The memory of that picture has more than once
kept me from straying too far from the place of purity and safety in
which her arms held me.

At a very early age I began to thump on the piano alone, and it was
not long before I was able to pick out a few tunes. When I was seven
years old, I could play by ear all of the hymns and songs that my
mother knew. I had also learned the names of the notes in both clefs,
but I preferred not to be hampered by notes. About this time several
ladies for whom my mother sewed heard me play and they persuaded her
that I should at once be put under a teacher; so arrangements were
made for me to study the piano with a lady who was a fairly good
musician; at the same time arrangements were made for me to study
my books with this lady's daughter. My music teacher had no small
difficulty at first in pinning me down to the notes. If she played my
lesson over for me, I invariably attempted to reproduce the required
sounds without the slightest recourse to the written characters. Her
daughter, my other teacher, also had her worries. She found that, in
reading, whenever I came to words that were difficult or unfamiliar,
I was prone to bring my imagination to the rescue and read from
the picture. She has laughingly told me, since then, that I would
sometimes substitute whole sentences and even paragraphs from what
meaning I thought the illustrations conveyed. She said she not only
was sometimes amused at the fresh treatment I would give an author's
subject, but, when I gave some new and sudden turn to the plot of the
story, often grew interested and even excited in listening to hear
what kind of a denouement I would bring about. But I am sure this was