I remember as a great and sudden discovery that the poetry of the Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton was a source of inspiring, exhilarating, uplifting pleasure; and I became anxious to know all the poets, and saved up small sums to buy as many of their books as possible.  Within three or four years I was the proud possessor of parts of Shakespeare’s, Milton’s, Cowper’s, Henry Kirke White’s, Campbell’s, and Akenside’s works, and quite a number of others seldom read nowadays.  I think it was in my fifteenth year that I began to relish good literature with enthusiasm, and smack my lips over favorite lines, but there was desperately little time for reading, even in the winter evenings,—­only a few stolen minutes now and then.  Father’s strict rule was, straight to bed immediately after family worship, which in winter was usually over by eight o’clock.  I was in the habit of lingering in the kitchen with a book and candle after the rest of the family had retired, and considered myself fortunate if I got five minutes’ reading before father noticed the light and ordered me to bed; an order that of course I immediately obeyed.  But night after night I tried to steal minutes in the same lingering way, and how keenly precious those minutes were, few nowadays can know.  Father failed perhaps two or three times in a whole winter to notice my light for nearly ten minutes, magnificent golden blocks of time, long to be remembered like holidays or geological periods.  One evening when I was reading Church history father was particularly irritable, and called out with hope-killing emphasis, “John go to bed! Must I give you a separate order every night to get you to go to bed?  Now, I will have no irregularity in the family; you must go when the rest go, and without my having to tell you.”  Then, as an afterthought, as if judging that his words and tone of voice were too severe for so pardonable an offense as reading a religious book he unwarily added:  “If you will read, get up in the morning and read.  You may get up in the morning as early as you like.”

That night I went to bed wishing with all my heart and soul that somebody or something might call me out of sleep to avail myself of this wonderful indulgence; and next morning to my joyful surprise I awoke before father called me.  A boy sleeps soundly after working all day in the snowy woods, but that frosty morning I sprang out of bed as if called by a trumpet blast, rushed downstairs, scarce feeling my chilblains, enormously eager to see how much time I had won; and when I held up my candle to a little clock that stood on a bracket in the kitchen I found that it was only one o’clock.  I had gained five hours, almost half a day “Five hours to myself!” I said, “five huge, solid hours!” I can hardly think of any other event in my life, any discovery I ever made that gave birth to joy so transportingly glorious as the possession of these five frosty hours.