42 JOHN DUNCAN, WEAVER AND BOTANIST. 



was never satisfied till he had read the whole chapter for 

 himself. By such praiseworthy assiduity, he gradually 

 became a tolerable reader. 



Yet, though he read so much during his lifetime, he 

 never was able to read with great fluency, having to the 

 last to spell his way over a new or long word, and doing so 

 aloud, even when reading in public, to the amusement of his 

 auditors, his own dead earnestness in the process preventing 

 any confusion on his part or perception of surrounding smiles. 

 What the Rev. Walter C. Smith makes dowie " Dorts the 

 Mason " say of himself, was greatly true of John Duncan : 



" Ye had rare schooling, I had almost none, 

 But gnawed a book as dogs will gnaw a bone." 



But John gnawed the bone to some purpose, and always 

 got at its marrow. This imperfection was no doubt due, in 

 great measure, to his extreme and permanent short-sighted- 

 ness, but may also have arisen from his late acquirement 

 of the art ; just as he never became a good speller, even of 

 common words, though seeing them so often. 



Writing he does not seem to have begun for several years 

 after this, being for the time satisfied with the attainment 

 and exercise of the new and glorious accomplishment 

 already gained, which opened to him the very gates of 

 paradise. He was long content to revel in the blissfulness 

 of mental acquisition; the need for written expression 

 would come by-and-by, and set him to achieve its 

 instrument. Thus we have no evidence of his learning to 

 write till almost twenty years after he came to Drumlithie, 

 in 1828, when we find him, in his thirty-fourth year, 

 laboriously working at a copy-book ! 



