ployed him to copy out his letters; and perceiving his ignorance of grammar, pointed out his mistakes, and advised him to remedy the deficiency. He set about the task with the utmost assiduity. He wrote out the whole of Lowth's Grammar two or three times; got it by heart, and every time he was posted sentinel repeated it to himself from the beginning to the end.
Under what difficulties he carried on the study he relates in a passage which shows the indomitable energy of his character. "I learned grammar," he says in his "Advice to Young Men," "when I was a private soldier on the pay of sixpence a day. The edge of my berth, or that of the guard-bed, was my seat to study in; my knapsack was my bookcase; a bit of board lying on my lap was my writing-table; and the task did not demand anything like a year of my life. I had no money to purchase candle or oil. In winter-time it was rarely that I could get any evening light but that of the fire and only my turn even of that. To buy a pen or a sheet of paper I was compelled to forego some portion of food, though in a state of half-starvation. I had no moment of time that I could call my own; and I had to read and to write amidst the talking, laughing, singing, whistling, and brawling of at least half a score of the most thoughtless of men, and that too in the hours of their freedom from all control. Think not lightly of the farthing that I had to give now and then for ink, pen, or paper. That farthing was, alas! a great sum for me! I was as tall as I am now; I had great health and great exercise. The whole of the money not expended for us at market was twopence a week for each man. I remember—and well I may—that upon one occasion I, after all absolutely necessary expenses, had, on a Friday, made shift to have a halfpenny in reserve, which I had destined for the purchase of a red herring in the morning; but when I pulled off my clothes at night, so hungry then as to be hardly able to endure life, I found that I had lost my halfpenny! I buried my head under the miserable sheets and rug, and cried like a child.
Such efforts compelled him to be an early riser, and most correct and regular in all his habits. He was soon marked as a self-reliant and reliable man. He was made a corporal, and then
