EARLY EDUCATION. 3 



life he could cite verbatim long passages from books or 

 poems which he had not read for many years, and apt 

 quotations from all sorts of sources seemed to come 

 to his lips without any effort of recollection whatever. 

 And much of his success in literature was no doubt due 

 to his marvellous power of extracting, as it were, at a 

 single reading, the pith from the numberless books 

 which he perused, and storing it up in some pigeon- 

 hole of his mind until required for use. 



Spelling, too, like reading, came naturally to him, 

 for he possessed that curious side-shoot of artistic 

 talent which enables one to see any required word in 

 the mind's eye, without depending for the letters 

 which compose it upon any mere effort of memory. 

 Strangely enough, however, there were two words 

 which always puzzled him, and to the end of his days 

 he could never spell " cheque " without the addition of 

 an unnecessary c, or " niece " without transposing the 

 second and third letters. And, with regard to these 

 two words, no amount of correction ever made the 

 smallest difference. 



Arithmetic, even in its simpler forms, was always 

 beyond him. He did, no doubt, know that two and 

 two make four, but I very much question whether he 

 ever mastered the multiplication table. And certainly 

 a piece of mere ordinary calculation was utterly outside 

 his powers. Possibly this was in great measure due to 

 the character of his early training. Mathematics, in 

 the days of his youth, were little regarded, and sound 

 classical knowledge was generally considered as the one 

 B 2 



