THE HYMN-BOOK.

ALMOST the first decided taste in my life was the love of hymns.
Committing them to memory was as natural to me as breathing. I
followed my mother about with the hymn-book ("Watts' and
Select"), reading or repeating them to her, while she was busy
with her baking or ironing, and she was always a willing
listener. She was fond of devotional reading, but had little time
for it, and it pleased her to know that so small a child as I
really cared for the hymns she loved.

I learned most of them at meeting. I was told to listen to the
minister; but as I did not understand a word he was saying, I
gave it up, and took refuge in the hymn-book, with the
conscientious purpose of trying to sit still. I turned the leaves
over as noiselessly as possible, to avoid the dreaded reproof of
my mother's keen blue eyes; and sometimes I learned two or three
hymns in a forenoon or an afternoon. Finding it so easy, I
thought I would begin at the beginning, and learn the whole.
There were about a thousand of them included in the Psalms, the
First, Second, and Third Books, and the Select Hymns. But I had
learned to read before I had any knowledge of counting up
numbers, and so was blissfully ignorant of the magnitude of my
undertaking. I did not, I think, change my resolution because
there were so many, but because, little as I was, I discovered
that there were hymns and hymns. Some of them were so prosy that
the words would not stay in my memory at all, so I concluded that
I would learn only those I liked.