A LADY OF THE ENGLISH AND CLASSICAL GRADUATING COURSE
A second volume which Ella carried proudly under her arm when she
went to the French class was called “Le Grandpère.” It was written
expressly for the use of schools—so said the title-page. It was
“Approuvé par le Conseil Royal de l’Instruction publique.” If further
proof was needed of its value, the fact that it was “Carefully
prepared for American schools” was surely sufficient. How could
anything be better for a child to translate?
“Le Grandpère” began, with unpardonable guile, quite like a story:
“The old Captain Granville inhabited a pretty village situated on
the shore of the Loire,” as Ella slowly translated it. But her
suspicions were soon aroused, for, looking ahead a few lines, she
found something about “charging himself with overseeing their first
education.” That did not sound promising, though it was possible
that the four grandsons who were being educated might do interesting
things betweentimes. As she read further, she found that the
grandfather educated them by taking them to walk every Sunday and
giving them instructive lectures. Now in Ella’s experience nice
children did not study their lessons on Sunday, neither did they go
to walk. It is true that occasionally, after they had been to church
and Sunday school, had eaten the cold Sunday dinner, and had read
their Sunday-school books through, they were allowed to take a quiet,
almost awesome walk up and down the paths of the nearest cemetery and
talk about the flowers or their books; but this was quite different
from an everyday stroll off into the country.
The four boys and their “Grandpère,” however, wandered off
shamelessly every Sunday—in the forenoon, too, when by all the
customs of Ella’s Sunday mornings they should have been at church.
It was true that occasionally their grandfather gave them a moral
lecture on a Sunday morning, but these lectures were often a puzzle
to Ella’s eight-year-old theology. For instance, she had, of course,
been taught to do what she knew was right, but she was quite at sea
when “Jules” confessed that he had struck his brother, and declared,
“laying his hand upon his heart,” that “something here” told him he
had done wrong. Ella laid her hand over the place where she supposed
her heart to lie, but nothing made any remarks to her. She concluded
that it was because she was not quite bad enough just then, and she
made up her mind that—although of course she would not do anything
wrong on purpose—yet the next time that she was naughty, she would
watch carefully to see if she heard any conversation in the vicinity
of her heart.
It was somewhat of a pity that Ella’s lessons made so little
impression upon the bulk of “Le Grandpère,” for it was quite an
amazing book, and to know it would have been a widely distended, if
not a liberal education. It began, indeed, so simply that Ella was
disgusted, for these boys, old enough to live in a seminary like
herself, actually were amazed when they saw the sun, and appealed to
their grandfather to tell them what it was. Ella did not appreciate
the exigencies of authorship or realize that there must be something
on which to hang a small lecture about the heavenly bodies.
Further on there were discourses on the five senses, on how to count,
on the history of the French sovereigns; and then the chapters
gradually worked on through slavery, avarice, extravagance, the
massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s Day, vaccination, and leprosy.
What could have been better for a child? Any deficiencies that in
later times manifested themselves in Ella’s education may be fairly
ascribed to her never having completed the translation of this
profound volume.
In Ella’s study of French, there was one thing that puzzled her
greatly. She was willing to believe that French people understood
French, but that they ever really knew it as she knew English without
studying Fasquelle and “Le Grandpère” was something that she could
hardly accept as truth. Then, too, the mother had told her that she
had had a great-great-grandfather who was a Frenchman; and she often
wondered whether, if she had lived in his day, they would have been
able to talk together. She could have said, “Have you the knife of
the brother of the carpenter?” but unless he made the proper reply,
“No, but I have the pencil of the sister of the dressmaker,” she
would not have known what to say next. She could never have said,
“Great-great-grandfather, will you take me to ride this afternoon?”
because that was not in Fasquelle.
She wondered if the French people really talked French every day, or
only when they had company. After long deliberation, she came to the
conclusion that they probably _talked_ French all the time, but that
of course they thought in English. These were the grown-ups. As for
the children, no one could expect them to talk French, certainly not
when they were playing. She wished she had one of them to play with.
It would be almost like meeting her great-great-grandfather as a
little boy.
Of course Ella “practiced.” In the sixties, boys “took lessons” only
if they showed some talent for music, but girls were expected, talent
or no talent, to spend in solitary confinement two hours a day at
hard labor on the piano. In Ella’s case, the two hours were lessened
to one by her mother’s decree, and “solitary confinement” was not
added to the hard labor, because, when the sad moment had arrived,
a genial “Bow-wow!” was always heard and a big black shaggy head,
followed by the rest of a great Newfoundland dog, pushed open the
door. If it chanced to be the day for Ella’s lesson, Ponto waved a
friendly apology to the teacher and withdrew; but on other days he
stretched himself out under the piano, and with a sigh of toleration
proceeded to sleep away the time until the hour was up. He never
failed to hear the first stroke of the bell, and if Ella did not stop
on the instant, he slipped his great muzzle under her wrists and
lifted them up from the keys.
Ella, like most children, had a healthy dislike of practicing. It was
such an unmanageable interference with her plans. “You like French
and you like arithmetic,” said her puzzled teacher; “why is it that
you do not like music?”
Ella pondered a minute, then she said: “It’s because there isn’t any
way to get the better of it. If I have arithmetic to do, I can work
hard and then I can say, ‘There, you old thing, I’ve done you in half
the time you wanted me to spend, and now Ponto and I are going to the
lake in spite of you.’ But no matter how hard I practice, an hour is
always an hour, and there isn’t any way to make it shorter.”
Of course Ella hated to count. Bribes were offered. “My music
teacher said that if I would count three weeks without stopping, she
would give me a piece,” Ella wrote in her little diary. In spite of
the promised “piece,” however, “One, two, three, four,” became as
tiresome as the multiplication table, and at length she invented a
way to make the time pass; she played very loud with one hand and at
the same time patted Ponto with the other.
She felt a little guilty when her music teacher said: “I heard you
practicing two or three measures over and over this morning, Ella,
and I thought what a good lesson you were going to have to-morrow.”
Ella did not reply, and she forgot to listen to see whether her heart
would make any speeches to her. She didn’t like practicing, and she
didn’t, and when she heard of remarkable little girls no older than
she who had taken only twelve lessons and could play “two pieces”
already, she did not care very much that she could play only one.
Neither did Ponto.
Ella had a reason for not caring. She firmly expected that some day,
even without that wearisome “One, two, three, four,” she would play
as well as the little girl with two pieces, perhaps even as well as
her teacher. It was all very simple and very logical. The teacher
wore a ring with a bright red stone in it and was able to play; by
and by _she_ would have a ring with a bright red stone, and then of
course she would be able to play. Ella knew that the grown-ups would
laugh at her if she told them her fancy, so she only whispered it
into Ponto’s ear. Dogs could understand, but grown-ups could not.
Like most children, Ella was younger than her years in some ways and
older in others. She could cherish a belief in the efficacy of a
ring to give her musical ability, and she could sit in a class with
“ladies and gentlemen” more than twice her age without a thought of
this being anything remarkable. Of course she knew that the children
in the village went to school with boys and girls of their own
years; but this was nothing; they did one thing and she did another,
that was all. She even took it as a matter of course when in the
“Institute Reporter,” the little four-page sheet that glorified the
seminary with printers’ ink, she saw her own name among the other
“ladies.” It had, too, a special mark of honor in the shape of an
asterisk indicating that she was “In studies of the English and
Classical graduating course.” To be sure, no one of her studies was
classical, and she was many years removed from graduation, but it
made one more name on the list.
As to the English, she really wrote with some degree of correctness
because she had never seen writings that were incorrect, and she was
quite aghast when she first heard the correction of compositions in
class. She wrote to her uncle, “I can’t stop for dates. I want to
tell you what funny compositions some of the scholars write. One
great boy wrote his and commenced every word with a capital letter.
I have not quite got to doing that.” Ella thoroughly enjoyed making
tiny blankbooks and composing equally tiny stories carefully adjusted
to the little pages. She even manufactured a paper for children,
composing, editing, and copying it all herself.
Every Monday evening the “Lyceum” was held, an exercise which was
expected to develop the literary ability of the students. Ella
had joined it as a matter of course, and when called on for a
recitation, she had given “Over the River” in her best style. When
the second call came, she decided, possibly with a latent instinct
for advertising, to read the first number of her paper. This was not
exactly an innovation, for the “Lyceum” already rejoiced in a paper
called “The Alpha.”
Ella’s paper was named “Little Pearls.” How the “ladies and
gentlemen” and the august faculty kept their faces straight during
its presentation is a mystery. It contained a few conundrums, whose
answers were promised “in our next,” but otherwise it was carefully
modeled on the weekly paper of the Sunday school. There were letters
from children with the patronizing comments of the editor; there
was an original story or two; and the sheet ended with the tragic
tale, drawn from the little editor’s own experience, of a tiny fish,
caught and brought home from the lake. I fear that the writer had
never been properly trained in “nature study,” for she stated that
the fish jumped out of the water and was found “lying upon its back,”
dead, and she declared, “although a cat has nine lives, a fish has
only one, and therefore it always stayed dead forever after.” Whether
this literary production lengthened the list of subscribers, no one
can say; but certainly Ella’s minute cash account showed no marked
increase of income on that date.