Dear, dear child! the thought of doing wrong but once was too much for
him! I shall always have it heavy on my conscience to have rewarded
this boy's love of what is right by calling upon him to write out each
of those exercises five times.
* * * * *
That thick-necked boy, whom you see there on the front row aiming at
looking very good, and whom his schoolfellows are wicked and
disrespectful enough to surname "Potted Angel," is sad and sour. His
eyes are half open, his tongue seems to fill his mouth, and to speak,
or rather to jerk out the words, he has to let it hang out. His mouth
moves sideways like that of a ruminant; you would imagine he was
masticating a piece of tough steak. He blushes, and never looks at you,
except on the sly, with an uncomfortable grin, when your head is turned
away. It seems to give him pain to swallow, and you would think he was
suffering from some internal complaint.
This, perhaps, can be explained. The conscience lies just over the
stomach, if I am to trust boys when they say they put their hands on
their conscience. Let this conscience be heavily loaded, and there you
have the explanation of the grumbling ailment that disturbs the boy in
the lower regions of his anatomy.
To be good is all right, but you must not over-do it. This boy is
beyond competition, a standing reproach, an insult to the rest of the
class.
You are sorry to hear, on asking him what he intends to be, that he
means to be a missionary. His face alone will be worth L500 a year in
the profession. Thinking that I have prepared this worthy for
missionary work, I feel, when asked what I think of missionaries, like
the jam-maker's little boy who is offered jam and declines, pleading:
"No, thanks--we makes it."
I have great respect for missionaries, but I have always strongly
objected to boys who make up their minds to be missionaries before they
are twelve years old.
* * * * *
Some good, straightforward boys are wholly destitute of humor. One of
them had once to put into French the following sentence of Charles
Dickens: "Mr. Squeers had but one eye, and the popular prejudice runs
in favor of two." He said he could not put this phrase into French,
because he did not know what it meant in English.
"Surely, sir," he said to me, "it is not a prejudice to prefer two eyes
to one."
This boy was wonderfully good at facts, and his want of humor did not
prevent him from coming out of Cambridge senior classic, after
successfully taking his B.A. and M.A. in the University of London.
This young man, I hear, is also going to be a missionary. The news goes
far to reconcile me to the noble army of John Bull's colonizing agents,
but I doubt whether the heathen will ever get much entertainment out of
him.
* * * * *
Some boys can grasp grammatical facts and succeed in writing a decent
piece of French; but, through want of literary perception, they will
give you a sentence that will make you feel proud of them until you
reach the end, when, bang! the last word will have the effect of a
terrible bump on your nose.
A boy of this category had to translate this other sentence of
Dickens:[2] "She went back to her own room, and tried to prepare
herself for bed. But who could sleep? Sleep!"[3]
[2] "The Old Curiosity Shop."
[3] Here I have to make a painful confession. I have actually
acceded to a request from my American publishers, men wholly
destitute of humor, to supply the reader with a translation of
the few French sentences used in this little volume. This
monument of my weakness will be found at the end.
His translation ran thus: "Elle se retira dans sa chambre, et fit ses
preparatifs pour se coucher. Mais qui aurait pu dormir? _Sommeil!_"