wild
grapes. Seated in the gracious shade of a wild tulip tree, I learned
to think that everything has a lesson and a suggestion.

Our favourite walk was to Keller's Landing, an old tumble-down
lumber-wharf on the Tennessee River, used during the Civil War to land
soldiers. There we spent many happy hours and played at learning
geography. I built dams of pebbles, made islands and lakes, and dug
river-beds, all for fun, and never dreamed that I was learning a
lesson. I listened with increasing wonder to Miss Sullivan's
descriptions of the great round world with its burning mountains,
buried cities, moving rivers of ice, and many other things as strange.
She made raised maps in clay, so that I could feel the mountain ridges
and valleys, and follow with my fingers the devious course of rivers.
I liked this, too; but the division of the earth into zones and poles
confused and teased my mind. The illustrative strings and the orange
stick representing the poles seemed so real that even to this day the
mere mention of temperate zone suggests a series of twine circles; and
I believe that if any one should set about it he could convince me that
white bears actually climb the North Pole.

Arithmetic seems to have been the only study I did not like. From the
first I was not interested in the science of numbers. Miss Sullivan
tried to teach me to count by stringing beads in groups, and by
arranging kindergarten straws I learned to add and subtract. I never
had patience to arrange more than five or six groups at a time. When I
had accomplished this my conscience was at rest for the day, and I went
out quickly to find my playmates.

In this same leisurely manner I studied zoology and botany.

Once a gentleman, whose name I have forgotten, sent me a collection of
fossils--tiny mollusk shells beautifully marked, and bits of sandstone
with the print of birds' claws, and a lovely fern in bas-relief. These
were the keys which unlocked the treasures of the antediluvian world
for me. With trembling fingers I listened to Miss Sullivan's
descriptions of the terrible beasts, with uncouth, unpronounceable
names, which once went tramping through the primeval forests, tearing
down the branches of gigantic trees for food, and died in the dismal
swamps of an unknown age. For a long time these strange creatures
haunted my dreams, and this gloomy period formed a sombre background to
the joyous Now, filled with sunshine and roses and