This is Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress."
Being a healthy boy, with strong out-of-door instincts planted in him by
inheritance from his seafaring sire, it might have been that he would
not have been brought so early to an intimacy with books, but for an
accident similar to that which played a part in the boyhoods of Scott
and Dickens. When he was nine years old he was struck on the foot by a
ball, and made seriously lame. The earliest fragment of his writing now
extant is a letter to his uncle Robert Manning, at that time in Raymond,
Maine, written from Salem, December 9, 1813. It announces that his foot
is no better, and that a new doctor is to be sent for. "May be," the boy
writes, "he will do me some good, for Dr. B---- has not, and I don't
know as Dr. K---- will." He adds that it is now four weeks since he has
been to school, "and I don't know but it will be four weeks longer."
This weighing of possibilities, and this sense of the uncertain future,
already quaintly show the disposition of the man he is to grow into;
though the writing is as characterless as extreme youth, exaggerated
distinctness, and copy-books could make it. The little invalid has not
yet quite succumbed, however, for the same letter details that he has
hopped out into the street once since his lameness began, and been "out
in the office and had four cakes." But the trouble was destined to last
much longer than even the young seer had projected his gaze. There was
some threat of deformity, and it was not until he was nearly twelve that
he became quite well.
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