The Days of a Man - 1922 Author:David Starr Jordan Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER TWO My very early education I received at home, and I Learning cannot remember when I did not know how to to read. But according to my mother it was i... more »n her au y lap, as she rested and read Greeley's Tribune, that I began to pick out letters, and then words. At about the age of nine I first went to school, the ungraded district school at Gainesville which I attended for four years, and was then "put in the Fourth Reader." From Orlin Cotton, the teacher, to whom as a lad I owed a good deal in various ways, I had much sympathetic encouragement. Under him I studied Latin, and for writing lessons (in place of conventional copybook tasks) he allowed me to make an annotated catalogue of the rulers of every nation of which I was able to secure a history. My first impulse in this direction had come from being set to list the kings of Israel by a teacher in Sunday school. And there also I had some helpful "Speaking voice training, being encouraged to "speak pieces" fucu" at church gatherings. In this effort I took a good deal of interest, doing fairly well, as I remember. After all, there is no great difference between appearing before a Sunday-school audience and addressing a congress or mass meeting. My last selection, I recollect, was J. T. Trowbridge's poem on Bolivar; this was in 1865, just after the death of Lincoln. In school I used to do my lessons very rapidly and then often amused myself by inventing or re- calling stories of adventure, which I illustrated by rough drawings oh a slate or on scraps of paper. My particular cronies seemed to appreciate those efforts, but both tales and pictures have been long since forgotten by their author. In those days I read eagerly the few books of travel I could secure, especially Dr. Kane's account of his polar expeditions. Ha...« less