[br][i][size=150]In my young days cards of different shapes were sold in pairs, in fancy shops, for making needle-books and pin- cushions. The cards were intended to be painted on; and there was a row of holes round the edge by which twin cards were to be sewn together. As I could not paint, it got itself somehow suggested to me that [b]I might decorate the cards by lacing silk threads across the blank spaces by means of the holes[/b]. When I was tired of so lacing that the threads crossed in the centre and covered the whole card, [b]it occurred to me to vary the amusement by passing the thread from each hole to one not exactly opposite to it[/b], thus leaving a space in the middle. I can feel now the delight with which I discovered that the little blank space so left in the middle of the card was bounded by a symmetrical curve made up of a tiny bit of each of my straight silk lines; that its shape depended upon, without being the same as, the outline of the card, and that [b]I could modify it by altering the distance of the down-stitch from the up-stitch immediately preceding[/b]. were to be sewn together. [br][/size][/i]

[i][size=150]As the practical art of sewing perforated card was already quite familiar to me, my brain was free to receive as a seed the discovery I had made, and to let it grow naturally; all the more because no one spoke to me then of tangents, or tried to teach me any algebraic geometry, till some years had elapsed. [b]Therefore, when I did begin to learn artificially about tangents, the teacher was not obliged to put cuttings into raw soil; he found ready a good strong wild stock of living interest in the relation between a curve and the straight lines which generate it, on to which he was able to graft the new knowledge.[/b] The teacher came, not as an outsider thrusting on me the knowledge of something unfamiliar and strange; but as a brother-seer more advanced than myself, who could show me how to make further progress on a path which I had already entered with delight.[br][/size][/i][br]