* * * I took to these as I took to milk, and, without the least idea what I was doing, got the taste for simple words into the very fibre of my nature.
There was day-school for me until I was eight years old, and then I had to turn in and work thirteen hours a day.

* * * * From the days when we used to spell out Crusoe and old Bunyan there had grown up in me a devouring hunger to read books.

It made small matter what they were, so they were books.

Half a volume of an old encyclopaedia came along--the first I had ever seen.

How many times I went through that I cannot even guess.