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 collections 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 compleat the paper.
This was to teach me method in the arrangement of thoughts.
By comparing my work afterwards with the original, I discovered
many faults and amended them; but I sometimes had the pleasure
of fancying that, in certain particulars of small import,
I had been lucky enough to improve the method or the language,
and this encouraged me to think 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 on me when I was under his care, and which indeed
I still thought a duty, though I could not, as it seemed to me,
afford time to practise it.
When about 16 years of age I happened to meet with a book,
written by one Tryon, recommending a vegetable diet.
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