Alfred spoke first, though the younger. “Will you really give it to the one who can most quickly understand and recite it before you?” She, glad and smiling, said, “To him I will give it.” He took it from her hand, went to his master and read it. When it was read, he brought it back and recited it. It is not at all improbable that Judith did not know of his power of memory, and that instead of learning to read it, in our sense of the word, he got his master to read it over till he knew it by heart and could point with his finger to the words as he recited them. John the Deacon, writing in the same century, said that Pope Gregory the Great (others ascribe it to Gregory III.) invented musical notation as a _memoria technica_ to remind him of tunes he had learned by ear. However that might be with Alfred, he had got the taste for written words, which never left him. He set to work to learn the daily course of the religious services of the several hours; and then certain of the psalms; and then a number of prayers. All this collection he had in a little book which he carried day and night in his bosom. Asser, who joined him many years later, often saw him use this little book to assist his prayers, amid all the bustle and business of a king’s life. But still there is a hint that when this collection was made it was only to him a representation of what he knew by heart; for Asser says he could not at that time gratify his most ardent wish to learn liberal art, because, as Alfred told him, there were then no good readers in all the kingdom of the West Saxons.[8] Indeed, he confessed to Asser with many lamentations and inmost sighs of his heart that the greatest of all the difficulties and impediments of his life had been that when he was young, and had the capacity for learning, he could not find teachers; and when he was more advanced in life, he was so harassed by a disease unknown to all the physicians of the island, as well as by anxieties of sovereignty, internal and external, and continual invasions of pagans, that there was no time for reading, even his masters and writers being to some extent disturbed in their occupations. But yet he never to the end of his life ceased from the insatiable desire of knowledge.