hday grandmamma began to teach me to read.
_I_ couldn't have remembered that it was that very day, but she has told
me so. I had very short lessons, only a quarter of an hour, I think, but
though she was very kind, she was very strict about my giving my
attention while I was at them. She says that is the part that really
matters with a very little child--the learning to give attention. Not
that it would signify if the actual things learnt up to six or seven
came to be forgotten--so long as a child knows how to learn.

At first I liked my lessons very much, though I must have been a rather
tiresome child to teach. For I would keep finding out likenesses in the
letters, which I called 'little black things,' and I wouldn't try to
learn their names. Grandmamma let me do this for a few days, as she
thought it would help me to distinguish them, but when she found that
every day I invented a new set of likenesses, she told me that wouldn't
do.

'You may have one likeness for each,' she said, 'but only if you really
try to remember its name too.'

And I knew, by the sound of her voice, that she meant what she said.

So I set to work to fix which of the 'likes,' as I called them, I would
keep.

'A' had been already a house with a pointed roof, and a book standing
open on its two sides, and a window with curtains drawn at the top, and
the wood of the sash running across half-way, and a good many other
things which you couldn't see any likeness to it in, I am sure. But just
as I was staring at it again, I saw old Tanner, who lived in one of the
cottages below our house, settling his double ladder against a wall.

I screamed out with pleasure--

'I'll have Tan's ladder,' I said, and so I did. 'A' was always Tan's
ladder after that. And a year or two later, when I heard some one speak
of the 'ladder of learning,' I felt quite sure it had something to do
with the opened-out ladder with the bar across the middle.

After all, I have had to get grandmamma's help for some of these baby
memories. Still, as I _can_ remember the little events I have now
written down, I suppose it is all right.

CHAPTER III

ONE AND SEVEN

I will go on now to the time I was about seven years old. 'Baby' stories
are interesting to people who know the baby, or the person that once was
the baby, but I scarcely think they are very interesting to people who
have never seen you or never will, or, if they do, would not know it was
you!

All