Another time he showed some address in extricating himself from the water-butt--a common child-trap.

He did not fear ghosts or thunder; instead of that, his early-developed landscape feeling showed itself in dread of foxglove dells and dark pools of water, in coiling roots of trees--things that to the average English fancy have no significance whatever.
At seven he began to imitate the books he was reading, to write books himself.

He had found out how to _print_, as children do; and it was his ambition to make real books, with title-pages and illustrations, not only books, indeed, but sets of volumes, a complete library of his whole works.

But in a letter of March 4, 1829, his mother says to his father: "If you think of writing John, would you impress on him the propriety of not beginning too eagerly and becoming careless towards the end of his _works_, as he calls them?
I think in a letter from you it would have great weight.

He is never idle, and he is even uncommonly persevering for a child of his age; but he often spoils a good beginning by not taking the trouble to think, and concluding in a hurry." The first of these sets was imitated in style from Miss Edgeworth; he called it, "Harry and Lucy Concluded; or, Early Lessons." Didactic he was from the beginning.