DREAMS. 49
side down : you think it must have hurt ; and are only sorry that it did not happen to a tall, dark-faced boy who cheated you in a swop of jack-knives. You innocently think that he must be a very bad boy ; and fancy- aided by a suggestion of the old nurse at home, on the same point, that he will one day come to the gallows.
There is a platform on one side of the school-room, where the teacher sits at a little red table, and they have a tradition among the boys, that a pin properly bent, was one day put into the chair of the English master, and that he did not wear his hand in the armlet of his waistcoat, for two whole days thereafter. Yet his air of dignity seems proper enough in a man of such erudition, and such grasp of imagination, as he must possess. Per he can quote poetry, some of the big scholars have heard him do it : he can parse the whole of Paradise Lost ; and he can cipher in Long Division, and the Rule of Three, as if it was all Simple Addition ; and then such a hand as he writes, and such a superb capital B ! It is hard to understand how he does it.
Sometimes, lifting the lid of your desk, where you pretend to be very busy with your papers, you steal the reading of some brief passage of Lazy Lawrence, or of the
