I think I've done this song an injustice. At some point I decided there were a few songs in the John Thompson Third Grade book to which I was going to allocate minimal effort, and this one was on the list. For me, minimal effort translates to sight-reading through the piece, perhaps a couple times if interesting. Since this one proved a little difficult to sight read, I guess I concluded it wasn't interesting and abandoned it. Yet whenever I listen to a recording of it, I find it's an extremely well crafted and moving song. Furthermore, it's composed in minor mode, and since my knowledge of how that mode works is extremely limited, I ought to learn more songs written that way. This is why I decided I can't quite let this song go by without playing it through a few more times. The song is largely arpeggiated: note the opening bars and the group of four measures depicted below them. The frequent accidentals are telling of the unbeaten path the melody treads. 
Pictured above right is an extremely high G, and an interesting shape the notes make in their progress to that point... lots of jumps followed by plateaux. Above left are a couple lilting phrases that flow very gradually down from the E flat to the A flat. The challenge is to keep that thumb down on D while performing the higher portion of the RH passage, but I'd already had some practice doing that in Boccherini's Minuet and The Skaters.
I'm hoping this section might help me analyse why I had trouble sight reading the text. I don't seem to have that kind of trouble when notes are written as quavers and semiquavers, etc. The beams connecting them must have a psychological effect, encouraging me to see them as a unit and therefore to read intervals more easily. I dunno, but I noticed that this was the case with Gavotte as well, since it contains a lot of disconnected notes. I compare my reading of those pieces to that of Pathétique, Watchman's Song, Tarantella, and Melody (Massenet). Those four gave me very little trouble presumably because they were full of quavers and their ilk. I guess I'll just have to motivate myself to see those connections even without the visual suggestion of the beams.
Alan Chan's rendition
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