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‘Which one, Master?’ Notice that I’d even begun to pick up some semblance of good manners?
    â€˜Whichever one falls most easily to hand,’ he replied indifferently.
    I selected a book at random and took it to him.
    â€˜Seat thyself, boy,’ he told me. ‘I shall give thee instruction.’
    I knew nothing whatsoever about reading, so it didn’t seem particularly odd to me that under his gentle tutelage I was a competent reader within the space of an hour. Either I was an extremely gifted student - which seems highly unlikely - or he was the greatest teacher who ever lived.
    From that hour on I became a voracious reader. I devoured his bookshelf from one end to another. Then, somewhat regretfully, I went back to the first book again, only to discover that I’d never seen it before. I read and read and read, and every page was new to me. I read my way through that bookshelf a dozen times over, and it was always fresh and new. That reading opened the world of the mind to me, and I found it much to my liking.
    My new-found obsession gave my Master some peace, at least, and he seemed to look approvingly at me as I sat late into those long, snowy, winter nights reading texts in languages I could not have spoken, but which I nonetheless clearly understood when they seemed to leap out at me from off the page. I also noticed - dimly, for, as I think I’ve already mentioned, my curiosity seemed somehow to have been blunted - that when I was reading, my Master tended to have no chores for me, at least not at first. The conflict between reading and chores came later. And so we passed the winter in that world of the mind, and with few exceptions, I’ve probably never been so happy.
    I’m sure it was the books that kept me there the following spring and summer. As I’d suspected they might, the onset of warm days and nights stirred my Master’s creativity. He found all manner of things for me to do outside - mostly unpleasant and involving a great deal of effort and sweat. I do not enjoy cutting down trees, for example - particularly not with an axe. I broke that axe-handle eight times that summer - quite deliberately, I’ll admit - and it miraculously healed itself overnight. I hated that cursed, indestructible axe!
    But strangely enough, it wasn’t the sweating and grunting I resented, but the time I wasted whacking at unyielding trees which I could more profitably have spent trying to read my way through that inexhaustible bookshelf. Every page opened new wonders for me, and I groaned audibly each time my Master suggested that it was time for me and my axe to go out and entertain each other again.
    And, almost before I had turned around twice, winter came again. I had better luck with my broom than I had with my axe. After all, you can only pile so much dust in a corner before you start becoming obvious about it, and my Master was never obvious. I continued to read my way again and again along the bookshelf and was probably made better by it, although my Master, guided by some obscure, sadistic instinct, always seemed to know exactly when an interruption would be most unwelcome. He inevitably selected that precise moment to suggest sweeping or washing dishes or fetching firewood.
    Sometimes he would stop what he was doing to watch my labors, a bemused expression on his face. Then he would sigh and return to the things he did which I did not understand.
    The seasons turned, marching in their stately, ordered progression as I labored with my books and with the endless and increasingly difficult tasks my Master set me. I grew bad-tempered and sullen, but never once did I even think about running away.
    Then, perhaps three - or more likely it was five - years after I had come to the tower to begin my servitude, I was struggling one early winter day to move a large rock which my Master had stepped around since my first summer with him, but which he now found inconvenient for