My mother was kept very busy with her sewing; sometimes she would have another woman helping her.  I think she must have derived a fair income from her work.  I know, too, that at least once each month she received a letter; I used to watch for the postman, get the letter, and run to her with it; whether she was busy or not, she would take it and instantly thrust it into her bosom.  I never saw her read one of these letters.  I knew later that they contained money and what was to her more than money.  As busy as she generally was, she found time, however, to teach me my letters and figures and how to spell a number of easy words.  Always on Sunday evenings she opened the little square piano and picked out hymns.  I can recall now that whenever she played hymns from the book her tempo was always decidedly largo.  Sometimes on other evenings, when she was not sewing, she would play simple accompaniments to some old Southern songs which she sang.  In these songs she was freer, because she played them by ear.  Those evenings on which she opened the little piano were the happiest hours of my childhood.  Whenever she started toward the instrument, I used to follow her with all the interest and irrepressible joy that a pampered pet dog shows when a package is opened in which he knows there is a sweet bit for him.  I used to stand by her side and often interrupt and annoy her by chiming in with strange harmonies which I found on either the high keys of the treble or the low keys of the bass.  I remember that I had a particular fondness for the black keys.  Always on such evenings, when the music was over, my mother would sit with me in her arms, often for a very long time.  She would hold me close, softly crooning some old melody without words, all the while gently stroking her face against my head; many and many a night I thus fell asleep.  I can see her now, her great dark eyes looking into the fire, to where?  No one knew but her.  The memory of that picture has more than once kept me from straying too far from the place of purity and safety in which her arms held me.

At a very early age I began to thump on the piano alone, and it was not long before I was able to pick out a few tunes.  When I was seven years old, I could play by ear all of the hymns and songs that my mother knew.  I had also learned the names of the notes in both clefs, but I preferred not to be hampered by notes.  About this time several ladies for whom my mother sewed heard me play and they persuaded her that I should at once be put under a teacher; so arrangements were made for me to study the piano with a lady who was a fairly good musician; at the same time arrangements were made for me to study my books with this lady’s daughter.  My music teacher had no small difficulty at first in pinning me down to the notes.  If she played my lesson over for me, I invariably attempted to reproduce the required sounds without the slightest recourse to the written characters.  Her daughter, my other