p. 55
Squatting upon his haunches on the table top in the cabin his father had built — his smooth, brown, naked little body bent over the book which rested in his strong slender hands, and his great shock of long, black hair falling about his well-shaped head and bright, intelligent eyes — Tarzan of the apes, little primitive man, presented a picture filled, at once, with pathos and with promise — an allegorical figure of the primordial groping through the black night of ignorance toward the light of learning.
His little face was tense in study, for he had partially grasped, in a hazy, nebulous way, the rudiments of a thought which was destined to prove the key and the solution to the puzzling problem of the strange little bugs.
In his hands was a primer opened at a piture of a little ape similar to himself, but covered, except for hands and face, with strange, colored fur, for such he thought the jacket and trousers to be. Beneath the picture were three little bugs —
BOY
And now he had discovered in the text upon the page that these three were repeated many times in the same sequence.
Another fact he learned — that there were comparatively few individual bugs; but these were repeated many times, occasionally alone, but more often in company with others.
Slowly he turned the pages, scanning the pictures and the text for a repetitionof the combination b-o-y. Presently he found it beneath a picture of another little ape and a strange animal which went upon four legs like the jackal and resembled him not a little. Beneath this picture te bugs appeared as:
A BOY AND A DOG
There they were, the three little bugs which always accompanied the little ape.
And so he progressed very, very slowly, for it was ahard and laborious task which he had set himself without knowing it — a task which might seem to you or me impossible — learning to read without having the slightest knowledge of letters or written language, or the faintest idea that such things existed.
He did not accomplish it in a day, or ina week, or in a month, or in a year; but slowly, very slowly, he learned after he had grasped the possibilities which lay in those little bugs, so that by the time he was fifteen he knew the various combinations of letters which stood for every pictured fugure in the little primer and in one or two of the picture books.
Of the meaning and use of the articles and conjunctions, verbs and adverbs and pronouns he had but the faintest conception.
One day when he was about twelve he found anumber of lead pencils in a hitherto undiscovered drawer beneath the table, and in scratching upon the table top with one of them he was delighted to discover the black line it left behind it….
He would attempt to reproduce some of the little bugs that scrambled over the pages of his books….
But he persevered for months, at such times as he was able to come to the cabin, until at last by repeated experimenting he found a position in which to hold the pencil that best permitted him to guide and control it, so that at last he could roughly reproduce any of the little bugs.
Thus he made a beginning of writing.
Copying the bugs taught him another thing — their number; and though he could not count as we understand it, yet he had an idea of quantity, the base of his calculations being the number of fingers upon one of his hands.
His search through the various books onvinced him that he had discovered all the different kinds of bugs most often repeaed in combination, and these he arranged in proper order with great ease because of the frequency with which he had perused the fascinating alphablet picture book.
His education progressed; but his greatest finds were in the inexhaustible storehouse of the huge illustrated dictionary, for he learned more through the medium of pictures than test, even after he had grasped the significance of the bugs.
When he discovered the arrangement of words in alphabetical order he delighted in searching for and finding the combinations with which he was familiar, and the words which followed them, their definitions, led him still further into the mazes of erudition.
By the time he was seventeen he had learned to read the simple, child’s primer and had fully realized the true and wonderful purpose of the little bugs.
No longer did he feel shame for his hairless body or his human features, for now his reason told him that he was of a different race from his wild and hairy companions. He was a M-A-N, they were A-P-E-S, and the little apes which scurried through the forest top were M-O-N-K-E-Y-S, He knew, too, that old Sabor was a L-I-O-N-E-S-S, and Histah a S-N-A-K-E and Tantor an E-L-E-P-H-A-N-T. And so he learned to read.
From then on his progress was rapid. With the help of the great dictionary and the active intelligence of a healthy mind endowed by inheritance with more than ordinary reasoning powers he shrewdly guessed at much which he could not really understand, and more often than not his guesses were close to the mark of truth.
The Bible and meaningful books 