baby to her heart. He cooed
joyously, and held up a sweet open mouth for a kiss. He got, not one,
but twenty kisses upon his wet lips, his pink face, his curly head, and
the bonny eyes that were bluer than the sky. Then she bent to give me
one--so long and tender that it checked sob and giggle.

"We will never make devil's race-horses fight again, Namesake. They have
a right to their lives. And a life is a very precious thing!"

Chapter III

Van Diemen's Land

[Illustration]

I learned to read that winter. How nobody knew, and I least of all.
Looking backward, I seem to have gone to sleep one night, an ignoramus,
and awakened next morning knowing letters, yet never having learned.

Cousin Molly Belle's solution of the puzzle submitted to her by my
mystified mother was characteristic:--

"It is the fable of Munchausen's frozen horn over again. All the
learning you have been pumping into the poor child for two years has
thawed out. I always told you that she had brains if you would wait
until they woke up."

I might speak of that enchanted season as my birth-winter. My mental
awakening was into another world, so much wider and fuller than that
with which I had been well content up to this time, that life was a
continual ecstasy. I discovered, early in December, that, as Mr. Wegg
was to immortalize himself by saying a quarter-century later--"all print
was open" to me. By the middle of February I had gone three times
through the inimitable classic, _Cobwebs-to-catch-Flies_, and read at
least six other books through twice, besides being up to my eyes and
over the head of my understanding in _Sandford and Merton_, that most
fascinating of prosy impossibilities. Beside the classic I have named,
and _Rosamond_, _Harry and Lucy_, Berquin's _Children's Friend_, Mrs.
Sherwood's _Little Henry and His Bearer_ and _Fairchild Family_, _Anna
Ross_ and _Helen Maurice_, we had no books that were written expressly
for children. No prepared pap being at hand, we expressed real
nourishment for the mind--relishful juices that made intellectual bone
and muscle--from the strong meat upon which our elders fed.

Did we comprehend all, or one-third of what we read, or heard read?

Less, probably, than one-sixth, but we got far more than would seem
credible to one who has been led up a graciously inclined plane of
learning. Our manner of receiving and digesting mind-food was very much
like Bud's way of testing unknown substance