This precocious infant, afterward General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of Revolutionary fame, declared in his later life that this early teaching was sad stuff, and that the haste to make him a very clever fellow nearly made him a very stupid one. [Illustration: _A ready way for children to learn their A.B.C._ Cau[f.]e 4 large dice of bone or wood to be made, and upon every [f.]quare, one of the [f.]mal letters of the cro[f.]s row to be graven, but in [f.]ome bigger [f.]hape, and the child u[f.]ing to play much with them, and being alwayes told what letter chanceth, will [f.]oon gain his Alphabet, as it were by the way of [f.]port or pa[f.]time. I have heard of a pair of cards, whereon mo[f.]t of the principall Grammer rules have been printed, and the School-Ma[f.]ter hath found good [f.]port thereat with his [f.]chollers. Facsimile from _Jewel House of Art and Nature_] Little Martha Laurens, born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1759, could, in her third year, "read any book"; and like many another child since her day learned to read holding the book upside down. Joseph T. Buckingham declared that when he was four years old he knew by heart nearly all the reading lessons in the primer and much of the _Westminster Catechism_. Boys entered the Boston Latin School when as young as but six years and a half old. They began to study Latin frequently when much younger. Zealous and injudicious parents sometimes taught infants but three years old to read Latin words as soon as they could English ones. It redounds to the credit of the scholarship of one of my kinsmen, rather than to his good sense or good temper (albeit he was a minister of the Gospel) that each morning while he shaved, his little son, five years of age, stood by his dressing-table, on a footstool, and read Latin to his father, who had also a copy of the same book open before him, that he might note and correct the child's errors. And the child when grown to old age told his children and grandchildren that his father, angered at what he deemed slowness of progress, frequent errors of pronunciation, and poor attempts at translation, would throw the book at the child, and once felled him from the footstool to the floor. [Illustration: Polly Flagg, One Year Old, 1751] It is told of Timothy Dwight, President of Yale College, that he learned the alphabet at a single lesson, and could read the Bible before he was four years old, and taught it to his comrades. At the age of six he was sent to the grammar school and importuned his father to let him study Latin. Being denied he studied through the Latin grammar twice without a teacher, borrowing a book of an older boy. He would have been prepared for college when but eight years old, had not the grammar school luckily discontinued and left him without a teacher.