y-books, by giving away my
one cooky, the quick reaction into common sense sent me in grief to my
mother, making use of natural tears and a specious plea of what I had
done to get me another cooky, or perchance two. It was a dead failure.
My mother knew too well the importance of the great moral lesson to let
me reap material advantage from my good deed. She relegated me to the
unfailing good dry bread, explaining how I could find abundant
satisfaction within my own breast for doing a kind action,--how virtue
was to be its own reward. I looked for the said reward, but could not
see it. It was not satisfaction within my breast that I wanted, but
within my stomach and on my palate. Benevolence will not supplement
alimentiveness in the small boy. If I gathered any reward at all, it was
in the hard wisdom of my resolve not to be caught in any such nonsense
again.

I had not, as had a little monster of misplaced piety whose case is
recorded in the good children's books, "at the early age of six made up
my mind on all the great questions of the day." Yet I think I can
remember yelling out "Hurra for Jackson!" because it was a good easy
shout, although my father was a strong, steady Whig. There is practical
democracy in that. First choice of shouts is much toward winning the
battle.

I was not remarkable for early piety, sweetness of disposition, wit,
beauty (I must certainly have been, as a child, skinny), or helpful
kindness (except that irrational benevolence of mine).

I have been told that I learned to read, nobody knew how, all by myself,
by the time I was four years old. How that may be I don't know; but I do
know that I did not know how to read when I was twenty years old.

I was a "natural speller." It is no joke, but one of the proverbial
fools' truths, which Dogberry enounces when he says that "reading and
writing come by nature." They do. And so does spelling. Abundance of
well-educated people never escape from occasional perturbations in
orthography, just as they never learn a desirable handwriting, nor how
to read silently fast and well, or well aloud. It is because they
cannot; because they have not what Nature gave Neighbor Seacoal; because
spelling and reading and writing are "gifts,"--they come by nature.

What I learned at school in those first ten years I do not know. Almost
nothing. I have utterly forgotten what. I might have been much better
taught. I might have been instructed in thinking. I do not