What many children think of with
dread, as a painful plodding through grammar, hard sums and harder
definitions, is to-day one of my most precious memories.
I cannot explain the peculiar sympathy Miss Sullivan had with
my pleasures and desires. Perhaps it was the result of long
association with the blind. Added to this she had a wonderful
faculty for description. She went quickly over uninteresting
details, and never nagged me with questions to see if I remembered the
day-before-yesterday's lesson. She introduced dry technicalities of
science little by little, making every subject so real that I could not
help remembering what she taught.
We read and studied out of doors, preferring the sunlit woods to the
house. All my early lessons have in them the breath of the woods--the
fine, resinous odour of pine needles, blended with the perfume of 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.
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