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Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays, I. A Cambridge boyhood (search)
before he is two years old; but he himself said, later, of this precocious teaching that it was sad stuff, and that by haste to make him a clever fellow he had very nearly become a stupid one. My mother made a memorandum in regard to my elder sister, She knows all her letters at three, and of me that at four I had already read a good many books. I still preserve a penciled note from a little playmate, the daughter of a professor, saying, I am glad you are six years old. I shall be four in March. My own daughter could not have written that note when she was seven, and yet she learned to read and write at that age almost without conscious effort. I cannot see that my contemporaries either gained or lost anything by this precocious instruction; and perhaps, in the total development of a child's mind, the actual reading of books plays a much smaller part than we imagine. Probably the thing of most importance, even with books, as an experienced Boston teacher once said, is to have be