Looking ahead to the end of the book from such humble beginnings, I quailed. How would we two ever get to the point where she could write the last dictation in the book, including punctuation?
Well, as of today, she has finished her spelling book, including that meandering, clause-ridden, eight-line question from The Spectator, archaic "ere" and all. It is a 1908 speller, handed down from a schoolteaching great-aunt, and from it the kids have written excerpts from Dickens and T. H. Huxley, letters to their children by Victor Hugo and William Makepeace Thackeray, poetry by Wordsworth and Longfellow, lists of "Largest Cities in United States" that are now mostly Rust Belt ghost towns and of American authors who are largely forgotten today, and many words that are uncommon now but if they run across them in old books, they'll know them. (Did you know what a quire is? We do now. Win at Scrabble!)
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