While the future Christopher was thus early asserting himself out of doors, the " Professor" also was displaying his capacity in the nursery. There his activity and animation kept the little circle alive from morning to night.With his sisters he was a great favorite; they looked up to his superior intelligence, and wondered at all he did. Of in-door amusements, the most exciting to their youthful minds and his precocious genius was that of pulpit oratory.One sermon he used himself to speak of as being a chef-4: MEMOIR OF JOHN WILSON. tfceuvre.So much was it appreciated, that he was continually called on to repeat it. Standing upon a chair, arranged to look as like a pulpit as possible, he would address his juvenile congregation, along with the more mature audience of nurses and other servants assembled to listen to his warning voice. The text chosen was one from his own fertile brain, drawn from that field of experience in which he was already becoming an adept, and handled not without shrewd application to moral duties. These were the words : " There was a fish, and it was a deil o' a fish, and it was ill to its young anes." In this allegory of life he displayed both pathos and humor, drawing a contrast between good and evil parents that excited sympathy and laughter, while the sermon was delivered with a vehemence of natural eloquence that, in a boy of live years old, may well have entitled him to be looked upon as a genius.One other anecdote may here be given, which he used to tell with much humor. As a child, he was very fond of drawing, an accomplishment he regretted in after life having laid aside, before he had acquired sufficient skill to enable him to sketch from nature. One day he had copied a tiger, and, no doubt, having given to the animal considerable characteristic vigor, his mother-with natural mother's pride-treasured the specimen highly. He was not aware of the sensation this juvenile success in art had created, till one morning a visitor was announced when he Avas present, and was scarcely seated, ere, to his surprise, she was accosted by Mrs. Wilson with the words, pronounced in broad Scotch, as was the manner in those days with many well-educated people, "Have ye seen oure John's teegar ?" when forthwith the " teegar" was exhibited to the admiring eyes of her guest. It was not long before " oure John's teegar" was well known in Paisley.*The time had now come when the training of the nursery was to be followed by regular education at school, and John was committed to the tuition of Mr. James Peddie, English teacher, Paisley.To a child who loved to learn, the drudgery of a first apprenticeship at school would never be irksome. A year or two with Mr.* In Flight First of " The Moors," I find an allusion to this work of art. " Strange that, with all our love of nature and of art, wo never were a painter. True that in boyhood we were no contemptible hand at a lion or a tiger-and sketches by us of such cats springing or preparing to spring in keelivine, dashed off some fifty or sixty years ago, mi...
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