Sometimes he could, and sometimes he couldn't.

However, as I said, before the day was over, he knew at least a dozen words perfectly well at sight.
Nor let any one think this was other than a great step in the direction of reading.

It would be easy for Willie afterwards to break up these words into letters.
It took him two days more--for during part of each he was learning to make shoes--to learn to know anywhere every word he had found in that hymn.
Next he took a hymn he had not learned, and applied to his mother when he came to a word he did not know, which was very often.

As soon as she told him one, he hunted about until he found another and another specimen of the same, and so went on until he had fixed it quite in his mind.
At length he began to compare words that were like each other, and by discovering wherein they looked the same, and wherein they looked different, he learned something of the sound of the letters.

For instance, in comparing _the_ and _these_, although the one sound of the two letters, _t_ and _h_, puzzled him, and likewise the silent _e_, he conjectured that the _s_ must stand for the hissing sound; and when he looked at other words which had that sound, and perceived an _s_ in every one of them, then he was sure of it.