“Having learned late in life, Tom was but a slow reader, and passed on laboriously from verse to verse. Fortunate for him was it that the book he was intent on was one which slow reading cannot injure—nay, one whose words, like ingots of gold, seem often to need to be weighed separately, that the mind may take in their priceless value.”

—Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852.