Father Bonneville was a very learned man, too, as well as a good one. He had read very much, for he had much leisure; had studied many languages and many things, and moreover had reasoned upon what he studied. All this I found out afterward; for at the time I speak of, though he made a point of instructing me himself every day, the store of erudition required for my mental food was but small. His lessons were given in a very different way from any other lessons that I ever received or ever heard of. He would sit down and open a book, and then begin to talk to me upon some apparently indifferent subject; but somehow before five minutes had passed, he had always contrived to bring the conversation round to something which the book contained, or which it explained, or which it elucidated. Then we would read a sentence or two, and then pause, and comment, and converse, sometimes remarking the language, and the niceties of style and grammar, sometimes dwelling upon the thoughts expressed or the facts related. It is wonderful how this course impressed every thing upon my mind. All that I read seemed to be surrounded by a sort of artificial memory; for every word was connected with these conversations, and the one always served to bring the other to remembrance. It took a little longer time, it is true; I read one page of Cæsar where another boy might read two; but I both remembered and understood what I had read, and possibly the other might not; nor am I at all sure that I did not make as much progress in the end. Where I got the first rudiments of education I do not know; for I cannot remember the period that I could not read or write, when I could not add up a sum with tolerable exactness, or draw helmets, and swords, and battle-axes, and very ugly faces, and men with enormous pig-tails, on the first leaf of a spelling-book. I have a faint idea that I was very ill when I first came to the house of Father Bonneville, and that illness may probably be the sort of gauze curtain which hangs between the eye of memory and the period antecedent, not altogether hiding the figures beyond, but rendering them confused and indistinct.