"No, I'm bound for the kingdom!
Will you go to glory with me?
Hallelujah! Praise the Lord!"

I began to go to school when I was about two years old, as other
children about us did. The mothers of those large families had to
resort to some means of keeping their little ones out of
mischief, while they attended to their domestic duties. Not much
more than that sort of temporary guardianship was expected of the
good dame who had us in charge.

But I learned my letters in a few days, standing at Aunt Hannah's
knee while she pointed them out in the spelling-book with a pin,
skipping over the "a b abs " into words of one and two syllables,
thence taking a flying leap into the New Testament, in which
there is concurrent family testimony that I was reading at the
age of two years and a half. Certain it is that a few passages in
the Bible, whenever I read them now, do not fail to bring before
me a vision of Aunt Hannah's somewhat sternly smiling lips, with
her spectacles just above them, far down on her nose, encouraging
me to pronounce the hard words. I think she tried to choose for
me the least difficult verses, or perhaps those of which she was
herself especially fond. Those which I distinctly recall are the
Beatitudes, the Twenty-third Psalm, parts of the first and
fourteenth chapters of the Gospel of St. John, and the thirteenth
chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians.

I liked to say over the "Blesseds,"--the shortest ones best,--
about the meek and the pure in heart; and the two "In the