Chapter XIII
School Days
My education began the day I was born, for I am told that, after a somewhat precipitous and unceremonious arrival, my father took me about the room to see the pictures on the wall—sundry chromos and steel engravings, which I am said to have observed with intelligence and pleasure. Having been intimately acquainted with several normal infants, I doubt, however, both observation and pleasure. Perhaps that early exposure to art was what determined my life-long interest in it, and in the joys of seeing. Those old-fashioned pictures may have presented to my inexperienced eye no more confused an image than do the latest post-impressionist interpretations of essential form or the soul of things to my trained sight.
After this introduction to the graphic arts I met poetry—familiar hymns and Mother Goose. I knew the ten little Indians who by a series of gruesome accidents were reduced to none, Prudy, Sanford and Merton whom I loathed, Pocahontas and Robinson Crusoe. I still possess a number of books that date far back in my life, among them Mary Mapes Dodge’s Rhymes and Jingles and Whittier’s Child Life. The only things my father ever read aloud to me were poems, usually out of the big green and gold House
