For--there you quickly come again!

It's God, I know, that makes you shine
Upon this little bed of mine;
But I shall all about you know
When I can read and older grow.

Long, long after the last line had become an anachronism, I used
to shout this poem from my bed before I went to sleep, whether
the night happened to be moonlit or no.

It must have been my Father who taught me my letters. To my
Mother, as I have said, it was distasteful to teach, though she
was so prompt and skillful to learn. My Father, on the contrary,
taught cheerfully, by fits and starts. In particular, he had a
scheme for rationalizing geography, which I think was admirable.
I was to climb upon a chair, while, standing at my side, with a
pencil and a sheet of paper, he was to draw a chart of the
markings on the carpet. Then, when I understood the system,
another chart on a smaller scale of the furniture in the room,
then of a floor of the house, then of the back-garden, then of a
section of the street. The result of this was that geography came
to me of itself, as a perfectly natural miniature arrangement of
objects, and to this day has always been the science which gives
me least difficulty. My father also taught me the simple rules of
arithmetic, a little natural history, and the elements of
drawing; and he laboured long and unsuccessfully to make me learn
by heart hymns, psalms and chapters of Scripture, in which I
always failed ignominiously and with tears. This puzzled and
vexed him, for he himself had an extremely retentive textual