Therefore I took
some of the tales and turned them into verse; and, after a time,
when I had pretty well forgotten the prose, turned them back again.
"I also sometimes jumbled my collection of hints into confusion, and
after some weeks endeavored to reduce them into the best order before
I began to form the full sentences and complete the subject.
This was to teach me method in the arrangement of the thoughts.
By comparing my work with the original, I discovered my faults and
amended them; but I sometimes had the pleasure of fancying, that,
in certain particulars of small import, I had been fortunate enough to
improve the method or the language, and this encouraged me to think that
I might possibly in time come to be a tolerable English writer;
of which I was extremely ambitious. My time for these exercises and for
reading was at night, after work, or before it began in the morning,
or on Sundays, when I contrived to be in the printing-house alone,
evading as much as I could the common attendance on public
worship which my father used to exact of me when I was under
his care, and which indeed I still continued to consider a duty,
though I could not, as it seemed to me, afford time to practise it.
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