So their father brought home two copies of Mavor’s First Reader and taught them the alphabet; but just as Laura was beginning on words of one syllable, he was sent away to work on a distant job, only coming home at week-ends. Laura, left at the “C-a-t s-i-t-s on the m-a-t” stage, had then to carry her book round after her mother as she went about her housework, asking: “Please, Mother, what does h-o-u-s-e spell?” or “W-a-l-k, Mother, what is that?” Often when her mother was too busy or too irritated to attend to her, she would sit and gaze on a page that might as well have been printed in Hebrew for all she could make of it, frowning and poring over the print as though she would wring out the meaning by force of concentration.

After weeks of this, there came a day when, quite suddenly, as it seemed to her, the printed characters took on a meaning. There were still many words, even in the first pages of that simple primer, she could not decipher; but she could skip those and yet make sense of the whole. “I’m reading! I’m reading!” she cried aloud. “Oh, Mother! Oh, Edmund! I’m reading!”

There were not many books in the house, although in this respect the family was better off than its neighbours; for, in addition to “Father’s books”, mostly unreadable as yet, and Mother’s Bible and Pilgrim’s Progress, there were a few children’s books which the Johnstones had turned out from their nursery when they left the neighbourhood. So, in time, she was able to read Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Gulliver’s Travels, The Daisy Chain, and Mrs. Molesworth’s Cuckoo Clock and Carrots.

As she was seldom seen without an open book in her hand, it was not long before the neighbours knew she could read. They did not approve of this at all. None of their children had learned to read before they went to school, and then only under compulsion, and they thought that Laura, by doing so, had stolen a march on them. So they attacked her mother about it, her father conveniently being away. “He’d no business to teach the child himself,” they said. “Schools be the places for teaching, and you’ll likely get wrong for him doing it when governess finds out.” Others, more kindly disposed, said Laura was trying her eyes and begged her mother to put an end to her studies; but, as fast as one book was hidden away from her, she found another, for anything in print drew her eyes as a magnet draws steel.

Edmund did not learn to read quite so early; but when he did, he learned more thoroughly. No skipping unknown words for him and guessing what they meant by the context; he mastered every page before he turned over, and his mother was more patient with his inquiries, for Edmund was her darling.