e other, he said to himself--

"The first word must be _How_. There it is, with a gap between it
and the next word. I will look and see if I can find another _How_
anywhere."

He looked a long time before he found one; for the capital H was in the
way. Of course there were a good many _how's_, but not many with a big
H, and he didn't know that the little _h_ was just as good for the mere
word. Then he looked for _doth_, and he found several _doth's_.
Of _the's_ he found as great a swarm as if they had been the bees
themselves with which the little song was concerned. _Busy_ was scarce;
I am not sure whether he found it at all; but he looked at it until he
was pretty sure he should know it again when he saw it. After he had
gone over in this way every word of the first verse, he tried himself,
by putting his finger at random here and there upon it, and seeing
whether he could tell the word it happened to touch. Sometimes he could,
and sometimes he couldn't. However, as I said, before the day was over,
he knew at least a dozen words perfectly well at sight.

Nor let any one think this was other than a great step in the direction
of reading. It would be easy for Willie afterwards to break up these
words into letters.

It took him two days more--for during part of each he was learning to
make shoes--to learn to know anywhere every word he had found in that
hymn.

Next he took a hymn he had not learned, and applied to his mother when
he came to a word he did not know, which was very often. As soon as
she told him one, he hunted about until he found another and another
specimen of the same, and so went on until he had fixed it quite in his
mind.

At length he began to compare words that were like each other, and
by discovering wherein they looked the same, and wherein they looked
different, he learned something of the sound of the letters. For
instance, in comparing _the_ and _these_, although the one sound of the
two letters, _t_ and _h_, puzzled him, and likewise the silent _e_, he
conjectured that the _s_ must stand for the hissing sound; and when he
looked at other words which had that sound, and perceived an _s_ in
every one of them, then he was sure of it. His mother had no idea how
fast he was learning; and when about a fortnight after he had begun, she
was able to take him in hand, she found, to her astonishment, that he
could read a great many words, but that, when she wished him to spell
one, he had not the