Volume 63 — CHAPTER VI.

A year after the resolution thus come to, I was at home for the holidays.

“I hope,” said my mother, “that they are doing Sisty justice. I do think he is not nearly so quick a child as he was before he went to school. I wish you would examine him, Austin.”

“I have examined him, my dear. It is just as I expected; and I am quite satisfied.”

“What! you really think he has come on?” said my mother joyfully.

“He does not care a button for botany now,” said Mr Squills.

“And he used to be so fond of music, dear boy!” observed my mother with a sigh. “Good gracious! what noise is that?”

“Your son’s pop-gun against the window,” said my father. “It is lucky it is only the window; it would have made a less deafening noise, though, if it had been Mr Squills’ head, as it was yesterday morning.”

“The left ear,” observed Squills; “and a very sharp blow it was, too. Yet you are satisfied, Mr Caxton?”

“Yes; I think the boy is now as great a blockhead as most boys of his age are,” observed my father with great complacency.

“Dear me, Austin—a great blockhead!”

“What else did he go to school for?” asked my father; and observing a certain dismay in the face of his female audience, and a certain surprise in that of his male, he rose and stood on the hearth, with one hand in his waistcoat, as was his wont when about to philosophise in more detail than was usual to him.

“Mr Squills,” said he, “you have had great experience in families.”

“As good a practice as any in the county,” said Mr Squills proudly: “more than I can manage. I shall advertise for a partner.”

“And,” resumed my father, “you must have observed almost invariably that, in every family, there is what father, mother, uncle and aunt, pronounce to be one wonderful child.”

“One at least,” said Mr Squills, smiling.

“It is easy,” continued my father, “to say this is parental partiality,—but it is not so. Examine that child as a stranger, and it will startle yourself. You stand amazed at its eager curiosity, its quick comprehension, its ready wit, its delicate perception. Often, too, you will find some faculty strikingly developed; the child will have a turn for mechanics, perhaps, and make you a model of a steamboat,—or it will have an ear tuned to verse, and will write you a poem like that it has got by heart from ‘The Speaker,’—or it will take to botany, (like Pisistratus) with the old maid its aunt,—or it will play a march on 524its sister’s pianoforte. In short, even you, Squills, will declare that it is really a wonderful child.”

“Upon my word,” said Mr Squills thoughtfully, “there’s a great deal of truth in what you say; little Tom Dobbs is a wonderful child—so is Frank Steppington—and as for Johnny Styles, I must bring him here for you to hear him prattle on Natural History, and see how well he handles his pretty little microscope.”

“Heaven forbid!” said my father. “And now let me proceed. These thaumata or wonders last till when, Mr Squills?—last till the boy goes to school, and then, somehow or other, the thaumata vanish into thin air, like ghosts at the cockcrow. A year after the prodigy has been at the academy, father and mother, uncle and aunt, plague you no more with his doings and sayings; the extraordinary infant has become a very ordinary little boy. Is it not so, Mr Squills?”

“Indeed you are right, sir. How did you come to be so observant; you never seem to—”

“Hush!” interrupted my father; and then, looking fondly at my mother’s anxious face, he said, soothingly—“be comforted: this is wisely ordained—and it is for the best.”

“It must be the fault of the school,” said my mother, shaking her head.

“It is the necessity of the school, and its virtue, my Kate. Let any one of these wonderful children—wonderful as you thought Sisty himself—stay at home, and you will see its head grow bigger and bigger, and its body thinner and thinner—Eh, Mr Squills?—till the mind take all nourishment from the frame, and the frame, in turn, stint or make sickly the mind. You see that noble oak from the window—if the Chinese had brought it up, it would have been a tree in miniature at five years old, and at an hundred, you would have set it in a flower-pot on your table, no bigger than it was at five—a curiosity for its matureness at one age—a show for its diminutiveness at the other. No! the ordeal for talent is school; restore the stunted mannikin to the growing child, and then let the child if it can, healthily, hardily, naturally, work its slow way up into greatness. If greatness be denied it, it will at least be a man, and that is better than to be a little Johnny Styles all its life—an oak in a pill-box.”

At that moment I rushed into the room, glowing and panting, health on my cheek, vigour in my limbs—all childhood at my heart. “Oh! mamma, I have got up the kite—so high!—come and see. Do come, papa.”

“Certainly,” said my father; “only, don’t cry so loud—kites make no noise in rising—yet, you see how they soar above the world. Come, Kate, where is my hat? Ah—thank you, my boy.”

“Kitty,” said my father, looking at the kite which, attached by its string to the peg I had stuck into the ground, rested calm in the sky, “never fear but what our kite shall fly as high; only, the human soul has stronger instincts to mount upward than a few sheets of paper on a framework of lath. But, observe, that to prevent its being lost in the freedom of space, we must attach it lightly to earth; and, observe again, my dear, that the higher it soars, the more string we must give it.”

Printed by William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

Page Changed from Changed to

439 when Conrad died, at the of twenty-six when Conrad died, at the age of twenty-six

441 allowed our lord to enter our walls allow our lord to enter our walls

442 with the Infante Don Pedro, daughter with the Infante Don Pedro, son

497 intrépide! A la recousse!” was intrépide! A la rescousse!” was

504 Liberté—Fraternité—Egalité Liberté—Fraternité—Égalité

506 Ah traitre! monstre! polisson Ah traître! monstre! polisson

Typos fixed; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.

Used numbers for footnotes, placing them all at the end of the last chapter.