CHAPTER II
BEFORE I was six years old my father took me into the village school of which he was the teacher. I remember that I could read and write very early, but not how I acquired those arts. Much I owed to the instruction which my father gave me at home. I had frequented the village school hardly a year when my father resigned his position as schoolmaster. The salary, about $90 a year, was too pitiably small to support the family, to which in the meantime two little girls had been added.
My father, like all who feel within themselves a yearning for knowledge with few opportunities for satisfying it, had the earnest ambition to give to his children the education that fate had denied to him. With this object in view he made a start in a new direction, and opened a hardware-shop, for which he appropriated a part of the house which had once been a cow-stable, hoping that the business would gradually yield an income sufficient for the family needs. In me he believed that he had discovered an aptitude for study. He therefore decided that at the proper age I should go to the “gymnasium” and later to the university, to be fitted for one of the learned professions. For the time being I continued to attend the village school, but the instruction I received there was early supplemented in various directions. It was my father's especial wish that all his children should study music. To this end, when I was about six years old, a queer little piano was procured which had neither pedals nor damper, and possessed several peculiarities incident to old age. But it served well for
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