Tim gave this his consideration.
“I’ll have to go forward and backward a lot,” he said. “I couldn’t put it all in order.”
“That’s all right. Just tell me today all you can remember about that time of your life. By next week you’ll have remembered more. As we go on to later periods of your life, you may remember things that belonged to an earlier time; tell them then. We’ll make some sort of order out of it.”
Welles listened to the boy’s revelations with growing excitement. He found it difficult to keep outwardly calm.
“When did you begin to read?” Welles asked.
“I don’t know when it was. My grandmother read me some stories, and somehow I got the idea about the words. But when I tried to tell her I could read, she spanked me. She kept saying I couldn’t, and I kept saying I could, until she spanked me. For a while I had a dreadful time, because I didn’t know any word she hadn’t read to me—I guess I sat beside her and watched, or else I remembered and then went over it by myself right after. I must have learned as soon as I got the idea that each group of letters on the page was a word.”
“The word-unit method,” Welles commented. “Most self-taught readers learned like that.”
“Yes. I have read about it since. And Macaulay could read when he was three, but only upside-down, because of standing opposite when his father read the Bible to the family.”
“There are many cases of children who learned to read as you did, and surprised their parents. Well? How did you get on?”
“One day I noticed that two words looked almost alike and sounded almost alike. They were ‘can’ and ‘man.’ I remember staring at them and then it was like something beautiful boiling up in me. I began to look carefully at the words, but in a crazy excitement. I was a long while at it, because when I put down the book and tried to stand up I was stiff all over. But I had the idea, and after that it wasn’t hard to figure out almost any words. The really hard words are the common ones that you get all the time in easy books. Other words are pronounced the way they are spelled.”