She learned to read very rapidly, the quick sight possessed by all natives no doubt much assisting her; in fact, when her father came to see her after she had been with us for a few months, she read aloud to him at such great length, to convince him of her progress, that his face exhibited in succession the three phases of delight, astonishment, and weariness, reminding me of the sensations ascribed by Johnson to the readers of 'Hudibras.'
I wish that I could have said that her energy in learning to sew equalled that shown in her efforts to master the mysteries of reading; her backwardness in needlework being the more provoking as her eye was so correct. She would come in from an hour's play in the garden to exhibit herself to me in a mantle of green leaves, put together in excellent shape with small bits of stick broken to the size of pins, but to construct a piece of dress by making a multitude of neat stitches appeared to require a perseverance in which her disposition was defective. I doubt, however, whether an Anglo-Saxon would have done much better who had spent the first eight or nine years of life without settled occupations or civilized habits.
The same keen sight, that enabled her so quickly to acquire a knowledge of the alphabet, soon made her acquainted with the figures on the clock's face, which at half-past twelve she described as being "cut in two, all same damper" (dampers or bush bread being of a muffin shape), but I found much difficulty in teaching her how to tell the time correctly. I could however always trust to her to bring me an accurate description of the relative positions of the two hands if I wanted to know the hour.
Binnahan's father, being a native shepherd, and there-
