The signs her boy had given of mental powers above the average were quite enough to warrant Mrs. Cooper's pathetic speech when he sought permission to become a shoemaker. His memory was remarkably retentive, and dated from a period which must be regarded as exceptionally early. On the day that he was two years old he fell into a stream that ran in front of his father's house, and was nearly drowned. He declares that he distinctly remembers being led by his father's hand over St. Thomas's Bridge on the afternoon of that same day, and how the neighbors "chucked him under the chin, and said, How did you like it? How did you fall in? Where have you been to?" Writing in 1871 he says, "The circumstances are as vivid to my mind as if they only occurred yesterday." Reading came to him almost by instinct, and at three years of age his schoolmistress set him on a stool to teach a boy more than twice his own age the letters of the alphabet. At the same age he could repeat several of Æsop's fables. On their removal to Gainsborough he was seized with small-pox, which fearful complaint marred his visage for life. This was followed by other complaints which kept him an invalid for a year. On his recovery he had to bear the annoyance, so bitterly painful to a child, of being either scouted or pitied for his altered looks. But the kindness he failed to find out-of-doors was more than doubled at home. The heart of a true mother and a right noble woman warmed toward the child in his weakness and sad disfigurement. Never had needy child a more devoted parent. It was hard work for the solitary woman to make a living and pay her way, yet she bore up bravely and did the best she could for her child. The picture which is given by Thomas Cooper in his Autobiography of his home at this time, and of his own and his mother's position, has a pre-Raphaelite simplicity about it, and well deserves a moment's attention. "Within doors there was no longer a handsome room, the cheerful look of my father, and his little songs and stories. We had now but one chamber and one lower room, and the last-named at once parlor, kitchen, and dye-house: two large coppers were set in one part of it; and my mother was at work amid steam and sweat all the day long for half of the week, and on the other half she was fully employed in "framing," ironing, and finishing her work. Yet for me she had ever words of tenderness. My altered face had not unendeared me to her. In the midst of her heavy toil, she could listen to my feeble repetitions of the fables, or spare a look, at my entreaty, for the figures I was drawing with chalk upon the hearthstone."[59] Returning to school again, he was, at five years of age, his teacher's favorite pupil, for he could "read the tenth chapter of Nehemiah, with all its hard names, like the parson in the church, as she used to say, and spell wondrously." Wandering through the woods with his mother, or going with her on her country