CHAPTER XVII.
HOW WILLIE WENT ON,

S soon as Willie began a new study, he began

trying to get at the sense of it. This caused

his progress to be slow at first, and him to appear

dull amongst those who merely learned by rote;

but as he got a hold of the meaning of it all, his

progress grew faster and faster, until at length in
most studies he outstripped all the rest.

I need hardly repeat that the constant exercise
of his mind through his fingers, in giving a second
existence outside of him to what had its first
existence inside him—that is, in his mind, made it
far easier for him to understand the relations of
things that go to make up ascience. A boy who
could put a box together must find Euclid easier
—the Second Book particularly—than one who had
no idea of the practical relations of the boundaries
of spaces; one who could contrive a machine like
his water-wheel, must be able to understand the
interdependence of the parts of a sentence better
than one equally gifted otherwise, but who did not