would sometimes condescend to explain to me in private what I did not
understand in his public lectures.

"I was presently advanced to the dignity of his secretary. He wrote
a miserably bad hand: and his manuscripts were so scratched and
interlined, that it was with the utmost difficulty he could decipher
his own writing, when he was obliged to have recourse to his notes
in lecturing. He was, moreover, extremely near-sighted; and he had a
strange trick of wrinkling up the skin on the bridge of his nose when he
was perplexed: altogether, his look was so comical when he began to pore
over these papers of his, that few of the younger part of our audiences
could resist their inclination to laugh. This disconcerted him beyond
measure; and he was truly glad to accept my offer of copying out his
scrawls fairly in a good bold round hand. I could now write, if I
may say it without vanity, an excellent hand, and could go over
his calculations as far as the first four rules of arithmetic were
concerned; so that I became quite his _factotum_: and I thought myself
rewarded for all my pains, by having opportunities of gaining every day
some fresh piece of knowledge from the perusal of the notes which I
transcribed.

"It was now that I felt most thoroughly the advantage of having learned
to read and write: stores of useful information were opened to me, and
my curiosity and desire to inform myself were insatiable. I often sat
up half the night reading and writing: I had free access now to all my
fellow-traveller's books, and I thought I could never study them enough.

"At the commencement of my studies, my master often praised my
diligence, and would show me where to look for what I wanted in his
books, or explain difficulties: I looked up to him as a miracle of