His understanding was quick and lively, and he learned readily and with pleasure. A cause of hindrance and delay that occurred to him in learning to read shall here be mentioned as a caution to parents, institutors, and governesses. To play at learning to read is regarded as a great improvement on the "Reading-made-easy," of less enlightened times. A lady made him a present of a cylindrical ivory box containing counters, on which were inscribed the letters of the alphabet. He trundled the box on the carpet, he threw the letters on the carpet, and viewed them in all directions, sometimes sideways, sometimes topsy-turvy; so that he no longer knew them again when he saw them upright in a book: b and q and d and p more especially puzzled him: besides, the place of letters in words is of great use towards learning their power, and this help his counters did not afford him. To impose on him the task of arranging the letters in _verbal_ order, would have included all the restraint of a formal lesson. The conclusion is, that if children play, they do not learn; and while they learn, they must not play: there is a time for all things: their lessons must be short on account of the softness of the brain, but attention must be insisted on; they cannot be cheated as to the nature of the occupation, but they have sense enough to find pleasure in the consciousness of improvement. When Kenelm was little more than five years and a half old, his elder sister died: she was thirteen months younger than himself. Never was child more lovely in death than this little girl. I gazed on her with the feeling, since portrayed in the inimitable lines of the Giaour, beginning He who hath bent him o'er the dead. These lines I read fourteen years afterwards at Avignon; they thrilled and electrified me: the touch of genius recalled the scene I had witnessed. Yet it should seem that associations supplied by reason and experience are requisite to the contemplation of such an object with the sentiments described by Lord Byron. I led Kenelm to see his sister two hours after her death: terror was his predominant emotion; the immobility of what still so much resembled life appalled him. He burst into tears. "If I had thought she would have looked _so_, I would not have come to see her;" nor could he for some time pass the door of that chamber without shuddering.