"How would you like to have me learn you?"
"I'd like it."
"Well; I'll learn you O first. That's the first letter I learned;" and he made a phenomenally large and round O in the upper left-hand corner of the sheet. The paper, finding insufficient resting-place upon the bony knee, took occasion to flap idly in the gentle southerly breeze; upon which the child took hold of it with a quaint air of helpfulness which was singularly womanly.
"Now I've learned O," she remarked, "I'd like to learn another."
"Well, there's an I; see, there?"
"The other one looks more like an eye," she observed critically.
"So it does, so it does!" Amberley admitted, much impressed by the discovery. "But then it's an O all the same, and this one is an I."
"Yes; well, I've learned that. Now, make another."
Thus unheralded and unawares come the great moments of life. When little Eliza mounted that wooden settle, her mind was innocent of artificial accomplishments; before she again stood on her round fat legs, she had begun the ascent of that path which leads away up to the heights of human knowledge. It is a long ascent and few accomplish it, but the first essential steps had been taken: little Eliza had become a Scholar!
Not only had she learned to recognize an O and an I, an S, an M, and an N, but she had laboriously made each one of them with her own hand. And, furthermore, she had seen them combined in a wonderful group which, if her teacher was to be credited, stood for Simon! It was better than drawing, infinitely better! Anybody could make a round thing with four crooked legs and a thin tail, and call it a calf—but only a scholar could put five letters together and make them stand for a man and a calf beside; a man with a kind voice and a big beard, and a calf that would lick a person's hand! Oh, but life had grown a wonderful thing to little Eliza, when she trotted down the hillside, clinging to the fingers of her new friend, and holding the sturdy little daisy in the other sturdy little hand.