That afternoon, as he worked beside his father in the mine, loading the loosened coal into the little cars, and pushing them down the chamber to be hauled away, he kept repeating the letters to himself, and from time to time he took from his pocket the soiled circus poster, and holding it up before his flickering lamp, picked out upon it the letters that he knew, to make certain he had not forgotten them. His father watched him curiously, but made no comment, being somewhat out of humor from having to work alone all the morning. Yet this passed in time, for Tommy labored with such purpose and good will that when the whistle blew their output was very nearly as large as it ever was.
After supper that evening, Tommy hurried forth to the hillside, and flinging himself face downward on the ground, spread out the bill before him and went over and over it again so long as the light enabled him to distinguish one letter from another, until he was quite certain he could never forget them.
At the end of a very few days he knew his alphabet, but, to his dismay, he found this was only the first and very easiest step toward learning to read. Those twenty-six letters were capable of an infinite number of combinations, and each combination meant a different thing. It was with a real exultation he conquered the easiest forms,—“cat” and “dog” and “ax” and “boy,”—and after that his progress was more rapid.
“HE PICKED OUT THE LETTERS HE KNEW, TO MAKE CERTAIN HE HAD NOT FORGOTTEN THEM.”
It is always the first steps which are the most difficult, and as the weeks passed he was regularly promoted from one class to another. The great secret of his success lay in the fact that he did not put his lessons from him and forget all about them the moment the school door closed behind him, but kept at least one of his books with him always. His mother even went to the unprecedented extravagance of keeping a lamp burning in the evening that he might study by it, and hour after hour sat there with him, sewing or knitting, and glancing proudly from time to time at his bowed head. They were the only ones awake, for husband and younger child always went to bed early, the one worn out by the day’s work, the other by the day’s play.
To Tommy those days and evenings were each crowded with wonders. He learned not only that the letters may be combined into words, but that the ten figures may be combined into numbers. The figures, indeed, admitted of even more wonderful combinations, for they could be added and subtracted and multiplied and divided one by another, something that could not be done with letters at all, which seemed to him a very singular thing.
The first triumph came one evening when, after questioning his father as to the amount of coal he had mined that day and the price he was paid for each ton of it, he succeeded in demonstrating how much money he had earned, reaching exactly the same result that his father had reached by means of some intricate method of reckoning understood only by himself. It was no small triumph, for from that moment his father began dimly to perceive that all of this book-learning might one day be useful. So when winter and spring had passed, and the time drew near for dismissing the school for the summer, Tommy could not only read fairly well and write a little, but could do simple sums in addition and subtraction, and knew his multiplication-table as high as seven. Small wonder his mother looked at him proudly, and that even his father was a little in awe of him!
It was about a week before the end of the term that Miss Andrews called him to her.
“You remember, Tommy,” she asked, “that I told you we would use your money for something better than buying mere school-books?”