of preparing
some of his dishes, such as boiling potatoes or rice, making hasty
pudding, and a few others, and then proposed to my brother, that if he
would give me, weekly, half the money he paid for my board, I would
board myself. He instantly agreed to it, and I presently found that I
could save half what he paid me. This was an additional fund for buying
books. But I had another advantage in it. My brother and the rest going
from the printing-house to their meals, I remained there alone, and,
dispatching presently my light repast, which often was no more than a
biscuit or a slice of bread, a handful of raisins or a tart from the
pastry-cook's, and a glass of water, had the rest of the time till their
return for study, in which I made the greater progress, from that
greater clearness of head and quicker apprehension which usually attend
temperance in eating and drinking.

And now it was that, being on some occasion made ashamed of my ignorance
in figures, which I had twice failed in learning when at school, I took
Cocker's book of arithmetic, and went through the whole by myself with
great ease. I also read Seller's and Shermy's books of navigation, and
became acquainted with the little geometry they contain; but never
proceeded far in that science. And I read about this time Locke _On
Human Understanding_, and the _Art of Thinking_, by Messrs. du Port
Royal.

While I was intent on improving my language, I met with an English
grammar (I think it was Greenwood's), at the end of which there were two
little sketches of the arts of rhetoric and logic, the latter finishing
with a specimen of a dispute in the Socratic method; and soon after I
procured Xenophon's _Memorable Things of Socrates_, wherein there are
many instances of the same method. I was charmed with it, adopted it,
dropped my abrupt contradiction and positive argumentation, and put on
the humble inquirer and doubter. And being then, from reading
Shaftesbury and Collins, become a real doubter in many points of our
religious doctrine, I found this method safest for myself and very
embarrassing to those against whom I used it; therefore I took a delight
in it, practiced it continually, and grew very artful and expert in
drawing people, even of superior knowledge, into concessions, the
consequences of which they did not foresee, entangling them in
difficulties out of which they could not extricate themselves, and so
obtaining victories that neither myself nor