When I was about eight years old, I went out one day to watch old Lemuel Hager, who came once a year to mow the grass in the orchard back of the house. As he clinked the whetstone over the ringing steel of his scythe, he looked down at me and remarked: “You favor the Hawley side of the family, don’t you? There’s a look around your mouth sort o’ like Aunt Almera, your grandmother--no--my sakes, you must be her great-granddaughter! Wa’l--think of that! And it don’t seem more’n yesterday I saw her come stepping out same’s you did just now; not so much bigger’n you are this minute, for all she must have been sixty years old then. She always was the _littlest_ woman. But for all that she marched up to me, great lummox of a boy, and she said, ‘Is it true, what I hear folks say, Lemuel, that you somehow got out of school without having learned how to read?’ And I says, ‘Why, Mis Canfield, to tell the truth, I never did seem to git the hang of books, and I never could seem to git up no sort of interest in ’em.’ “And she says back, ‘Well, no great boy of eighteen in the town _I_ live in is a-goin’ to grow up without he knows how to read the Declaration of Independence,’ says she. And she made me stop work for an hour--she paid me just the same for it--took me into the house, and started teaching me. “Great land of love! if the teacher at school had ’a’ taught me like that, I’d ’a’ been a minister! I felt as though she’d cracked a hole in my head and was just pouring the l’arning in through a funnel. And ’twa’n’t more’n ten minutes before she found out ’twas my eyes the trouble. I’m terrible near-sighted. Well, that was before the days when everybody wore specs. There wa’n’t no way to git specs for me; but you couldn’t stump Aunt Almera. She just grabbed up a sort of magnifying-glass that she used, she said, for her sewing, now her eyes were kind o’ failing her, and she give it to me. ‘I’ll take bigger stitches,’ says she, laughing; ‘big stitches don’t matter so much as reading for an American citizen.’ “Well, sir, she didn’t forgit me; she kept at me to practice to home with my magnifying-glass, and it was years before I could git by the house without Aunt Almera come out on the porch and hollered to me, that bossy way she had, ‘Lemuel, you come in for a minute and let me hear you read.’ Sometimes it kind o’ madded me, she had such a way o’ thinkin’ she could make everybody stand ’round. And sometimes it made me laugh, she was so old, and not much bigger’n my fist. But, by gol, I l’arned to read, and I have taken a sight of comfort out of it. I don’t never set down in the evening and open up the Necronsett ‘Journal’ without I think of Aunt Almera Canfield.”