My Father devoted himself exclusively to agriculture, and I learned to
do all kinds of farm-work. The district grammar-school was then kept
within half-a-mile of my Father's residence, by Mr. James Mitchell
(afterwards Judge Mitchell), an excellent classical scholar; he came
from Scotland with the late Rt. Rev. Dr. Strachan, first Bishop of
Toronto. Mr. Mitchell married my youngest sister. He treated me with
much kindness. When I recited to him my lessons in English grammar he
often said that he had never studied the English grammar himself, that
he wrote and spoke English by the Latin grammar. At the age of fourteen
I had the opportunity of attending a course of instruction in the
English language given by two professors, the one an Englishman, and the
other an American, who taught nothing but English grammar. They
professed in one course of instruction, by lectures, to enable a
diligent pupil to parse any sentence in the English language. I was sent
to attend these lectures, the only boarding abroad for school
instruction I ever enjoyed. My previous knowledge of the _letter_ of the
grammar was of great service to me, and gave me an advantage over other
pupils, so that before the end of the course I was generally called up
to give visitors an illustration of the success of the system, which was
certainly the most effective I have ever since witnessed, having charts,
etc., to illustrate the agreement and government of words.

This whole course of instruction by two able men, who did nothing but
teach grammar from one week's end to another had to me all the
attraction of a charm and a new discovery. It gratified both curiosity
and ambition, and I pursued it with absorbing interest, until I had gone
through Murray's two volumes of "Expositions and Exercises," Lord Kames'
"Elements of Criticism," and Blair's "Lectures on Rhetoric," of which I
still have the notes which I then made. The same professors obtained
sufficient encouragement to give a second course of instruction and
lectures at Vittoria, and one of them becoming ill, the other solicited
my Father to allow me to assist him, as it would be useful to me, while
it would enable him to fulfil his engagements. Thus, before I was
sixteen, I was inducted as a teacher, by lecturing on my native
language. This course of instruction, and exercises in English, have
proved of the greatest advantage to me, not less in enabling me to study
foreign languages than in using my ow