Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt kept an evening school in the village; that is to say, she was a ridiculous old woman of limited means and unlimited infirmity, who used to go to sleep from six to seven every evening, in the society of youth who paid twopence per week each, for the improving opportunity of seeing her do it.  She rented a small cottage, and Mr. Wopsle had the room up-stairs, where we students used to overhear him reading aloud in a most dignified and terrific manner, and occasionally bumping on the ceiling.  There was a fiction that Mr. Wopsle “examined” the scholars, once a quarter.  What he did on those occasions was to turn up his cuffs, stick up his hair, and give us Mark Antony’s oration over the body of Caesar.  This was always followed by Collins’s Ode on the Passions, wherein I particularly venerated Mr. Wopsle as Revenge, throwing his blood-stained sword in thunder down, and taking the War-denouncing trumpet with a withering look.  It was not with me then, as it was in later life, when I fell into the society of the Passions, and compared them with Collins and Wopsle, rather to the disadvantage of both gentlemen.

Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt, besides keeping this Educational Institution, kept — in the same room — a little general shop.  She had no idea what stock she had, or what the price of anything in it was; but there was a little greasy memorandum-book kept in a drawer, which served as a Catalogue of Prices, and by this oracle Biddy arranged all the shop transaction.  Biddy was Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt’s granddaughter; I confess myself quiet unequal to the working out of the problem, what relation she was to Mr. Wopsle.  She was an orphan like myself; like me, too, had been brought up by hand.  She was most noticeable, I thought, in respect of her extremities; for, her hair always wanted brushing, her hands always wanted washing, and her shoes always wanted mending and pulling up at heel.  This description must be received with a week-day limitation.  On Sundays, she went to church elaborated.

Much of my unassisted self, and more by the help of Biddy than of Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt, I struggled through the alphabet as if it had been a bramble-bush; getting considerably worried and scratched by every letter.  After that, I fell among those thieves, the nine figures, who seemed every evening to do something new to disguise themselves and baffle recognition.  But, at last I began, in a purblind groping way, to read, write, and cipher, on the very smallest scale.

One night, I was sitting in the chimney-corner with my slate, expending great efforts on the production of a letter to Joe.  I think it must have been a fully year after our hunt upon the marshes, for it was a long time after, and it was winter and a hard frost.  With an alphabet on the hearth at my feet for reference, I contrived in an hour or two to print and smear this epistle: 

“MI deer Jo i ope U R KR wite well i ope i SHAL son B HABELL 4 2 TEEDGE U Jo an then we SHORL B so GLODD an Wen i M PRENGTD 2 U Jo wot LARX an BLEVE me INF XN pip.”