He read and re-read these, and groped his way to their
meaning with doubt and difficulty.
Being a woman, Mollie Ainslie was not speculative. She could not
solve this problem of strength and weakness. In power of thought,
breadth of reasoning, and keenness of analysis she felt that
he was her master; in knowledge--the power of acquiring and using
scientific facts--she could but laugh at his weakness. It puzzled
her. She wondered at it; but she had never sought to assign a reason
for it. It remained for the learner himself to do this. One day,
after weeks of despondency, he changed places with his teacher
during the hour devoted to his lessons, and taught her why it was
that he, Eliab Hill, with all his desire to learn and his ceaseless
application to his tasks, yet made so little progress in the
acquisition of knowledge.
"It ain't so much the words, Miss Mollie," he said, as he threw
down a book in which he had asked her to explain some passage she
had never read before, but the meaning of which came to her at a
glance--"it ain't so much the words as it is the ideas that trouble
me. These men who write seem to think and feel differently from
those I have known. I can learn the words, but when I have them
all right I am by no means sure that I know just what they mean,"
"Why, you must," said the positive little Yankee woman; "when one
has the words and knows the meaning of all of them, he cannot help
knowing what the writer means.
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