The Vancouver independent. (Vancouver, W.T. [Wash.]) 1875-1910, 1882-08-10
Naturally Literary.

Janet Hamilton lived in the town of
Coatbridge in Lanarkshire, if am not
mistaken. Ishould like to tell you what
can be done by one to whom God has
given great love of books. Janet Ham
ilton was the daughter of shoemaker,
who employed one journeyman. and, as
might BIZ reasonably supposed, she be-
came the wife of that journeyman
(laughter) at very early age, earlier
than 1 should recommend in similar
cases. However, during her life she had
family of ten children, most of whom,
believe, grew up to manhood and wo-
manhood (hear, hear). But she never
went to school, and her mother, who
was the shoem 'kers wife, who taught
her to read, did not learn to read till she
was 30; she became blind at 60, and she
lived, think, until she was 75 or 76.
As for the points of her life, she never
saw mountain, she never saw any river
but the river Clyde, and she was never
twenty miles away from her own humble
dwelling. She read in childhood, at five
or six years of age, Bible stories, little
stories that her mother procured for her,
and at eight years of age she found, by
accident, on the beam of weaver's loom
in her neighborhood, two volumes, one
was Paradise Lost" and the other was
Allan Ramsays poems. She read with
extraordinary eagerness, and did not for
get what she read, as some of us are apt
TO do.
She read through the village library,
history, biography, travels, and when
she got to Shakespeare, Shakespeare was
Islro rouolokiovI 10 nv INhanpu | Oho
had no words In which she could ex-
press her admiration for his writings,
and she said that in those days 1t was not
considered very good thing for serious
people to read Shakespeare. Laughter.
There was hole in the wall in her
house near the chair on which she
nursed her children, and where she
worked at some kind of tambour frame;
and when people came in she put the
Shakespeare into the hole in the wall so
that it might not be seen, and her con-
duct criticised. She said that in her
childhood her mother had led her every
morning after she could read, to read
chapter in the bible, which was done
without intermission till she left her
home ard had home Of her own. Her
love Of books was her ruling passion, mot
Withstanding the character Of her child
hood and the work she had to do. So
far ~ I know. nothing was neglected,
but she suffered from sitting up to read
till 2 o'clock in the morning. for she be-
lieved that it had the effect OF very much
injuring and at last depriving her Of her
sight.
Somebody asked her how. having
never been to school, she wrote so &C.
curately--not only in q newspaper, but
she wrote also for one of Cassel1's pub
hcations when 81 years of age, and it is
almost impossible now to read her writ
ing, the letters are so curiously formed;
but she was asked how she came to write
10 dramatically, and she replied: 'You
may - we'll ask why the lark can sing."
God had given her not, as Sir David
Dundas said, "a great love Of books"
but q natural gift of grammar. Laugh
ter. This old lady has written poems,
OF which. IL there were time, I would
have quoted two or three. but certainly
there are some OF them which, il placed
among the poems of Burns in . volume
Of his, no one would for moment doubt
they were the production Of the greatest
Of all the SCOTCH poets. From John
Bright's Birmingham speech.