ord to his mind, by asking him what
letter it was that he had sounded as if it had been a double letter;
he said _s_. And what double letter did you sound as if it had been
single? _f_, said the boy. Then, said his father, you have found out
that it was a word in which there was a double _ff_ and a single _s_,
and that it is the Latin for _diffused_. Oh, suffusa, said the boy.

This boy, who had such difficulty in learning a single Latin word, by
repeating it forty times, showed in other instances, that he was by no
means deficient in recollective memory. On the contrary, though he
read very little, and seldom learned any thing by rote, he applied
happily any thing that he read or heard in conversation.

(March 31st, 1796.) His father told him, that he had this morning seen
a large horn at a gentleman's in the neighbourhood. It was found
thirty spades depth below the surface of the earth, in a bog. With the
horn was found a carpet, and wrapped up in the carpet a lump of
tallow. "Now," said his father, "how could that lump of tallow come
there? Or was it tallow, do you think? Or what could it be?"

H---- (a boy of 14, brother to S----) said, he thought it might have
been buried by some robbers, after they had committed some robbery; he
thought the lump was tallow.

S---- said, "Perhaps some dead body might have been wrapped up in the
carpet and buried; and the dead body might have turned into
tallow."[53]

"How came you," said his father, "to think of a dead body's turning
into tallow?"

"You told me," said the boy, "You read to me, I mean, an account of
some dead bodies that had been buried a great many years, which had
turned into tallow."

"Spermaceti," you mean? "Yes."

S---- had heard the account he alluded to above two months before this
time. No one in company recollected it except himself, though several
had heard it.

Amongst the few things which S---- had learnt by heart, was the Hymn
to Adversity. A very slight circumstance may show, that he did not get
this poem merely as a tiresome lesson, as children sometimes learn by
rote what they do not understand, and which they never recollect
except in the arduous moments of formal repetition.

A few days after S---- had learned the Hymn to Adversity, he happened
to hear his sister say to a lady, "I observed you pitied me for having
had a whitlow on my finger, more than any body else did, because you
have had one yourself." S----'s father asked him why h