The Mill on the Floss

om’s “First Half”

Tom Tulliver’s sufferings during the first quarter he was at King’s
Lorton, under the distinguished care of the Rev. Walter Stelling, were
rather severe. At Mr Jacob’s academy life had not presented itself to
him as a difficult problem; there were plenty of fellows to play with,
and Tom being good at all active games,—fighting especially,—had that
precedence among them which appeared to him inseparable from the
personality of Tom Tulliver. Mr Jacobs himself, familiarly known as Old
Goggles, from his habit of wearing spectacles, imposed no painful awe;
and if it was the property of snuffy old hypocrites like him to write
like copperplate and surround their signatures with arabesques, to
spell without forethought, and to spout “my name is Norval” without
bungling, Tom, for his part, was glad he was not in danger of those
mean accomplishments. He was not going to be a snuffy schoolmaster, he,
but a substantial man, like his father, who used to go hunting when he
was younger, and rode a capital black mare,—as pretty a bit of
horse-flesh as ever you saw; Tom had heard what her points were a
hundred times. He meant to go hunting too, and to be generally
respected. When people were grown up, he considered, nobody inquired
about their writing and spelling; when he was a man, he should be
master of everything, and do just as he liked. It had been very
difficult for him to reconcile himself to the idea that his school-time
was to be prolonged and that he was not to be brought up to his
father’s business, which he had always thought extremely pleasant; for
it was nothing but riding about, giving orders, and going to market;
and he thought that a clergyman would give him a great many Scripture
lessons, and probably make him learn the Gospel and Epistle on a
Sunday, as well as the Collect. But in the absence of specific
information, it was impossible for him to imagine that school and a
schoolmaster would be something entirely different from the academy of
Mr Jacobs. So, not to be at a deficiency, in case of his finding genial
companions, he had taken care to carry with him a small box of
percussion-caps; not that there was anything particular to be done with
them, but they would serve to impress strange boys with a sense of his
familiarity with guns. Thus poor Tom, though he saw very clearly
through Maggie’s illusions, was not without illusions of his own, which
were to be cruelly dissipated by his enlarged experience at King’s
Lorton.

He had not been there a fortnight before it was evident to him that
life, complicated not only with the Latin grammar but with a new
standard of English pronunciation, was a very difficult business, made
all the more obscure by a thick mist of bashfulness. Tom, as you have
observed, was never an exception among boys for ease of address; but
the difficulty of enunciating a monosyllable in reply to Mr or Mrs
Stelling was so great, that he even dreaded to be asked at table
whether he would have more pudding. As to the percussion-caps, he had
almost resolved, in the bitterness of his heart, that he would throw
them into a neighbouring pond; for not only was he the solitary pupil,
but he began even to have a certain scepticism about guns, and a
general sense that his theory of life was undermined. For Mr Stelling
thought nothing of guns, or horses either, apparently; and yet it was
impossible for Tom to despise Mr Stelling as he had despised Old
Goggles. If there were anything that was not thoroughly genuine about
Mr Stelling, it lay quite beyond Tom’s power to detect it; it is only
by a wide comparison of facts that the wisest full-grown man can
distinguish well-rolled barrels from mere supernal thunder.

Mr Stelling was a well-sized, broad-chested man, not yet thirty, with
flaxen hair standing erect, and large lightish-gray eyes, which were
always very wide open; he had a sonorous bass voice, and an air of
defiant self-confidence inclining to brazenness. He had entered on his
career with great vigor, and intended to make a considerable impression
on his fellow-men. The Rev. Walter Stelling was not a man who would
remain among the “inferior clergy” all his life. He had a true British
determination to push his way in the world,—as a schoolmaster, in the
first place, for there were capital masterships of grammar-schools to
be had, and Mr Stelling meant to have one of them; but as a preacher
also, for he meant always to preach in a striking manner, so as to have
his congregation swelled by admirers from neighbouring parishes, and to
produce a great sensation whenever he took occasional duty for a
brother clergyman of minor gifts. The style of preaching he had chosen
was the extemporaneous, which was held little short of the miraculous
in rural parishes like King’s Lorton. Some passages of Massillon and
Bourdaloue, which he knew by heart, were really very effective when
rolled out in Mr Stelling’s deepest tones; but as comparatively feeble
appeals of his own were delivered in the same loud and impressive
manner, they were often thought quite as striking by his hearers. Mr
Stelling’s doctrine was of no particular school; if anything, it had a
tinge of evangelicalism, for that was “the telling thing” just then in
the diocese to which King’s Lorton belonged. In short, Mr Stelling was
a man who meant to rise in his profession, and to rise by merit,
clearly, since he had no interest beyond what might be promised by a
problematic relationship to a great lawyer who had not yet become Lord
Chancellor. A clergyman who has such vigorous intentions naturally gets
a little into debt at starting; it is not to be expected that he will
live in the meagre style of a man who means to be a poor curate all his
life; and if the few hundreds Mr Timpson advanced toward his daughter’s
fortune did not suffice for the purchase of handsome furniture,
together with a stock of wine, a grand piano, and the laying out of a
superior flower-garden, it followed in the most rigorous manner, either
that these things must be procured by some other means, or else that
the Rev. Mr Stelling must go without them, which last alternative would
be an absurd procrastination of the fruits of success, where success
was certain. Mr Stelling was so broad-chested and resolute that he felt
equal to anything; he would become celebrated by shaking the
consciences of his hearers, and he would by and by edit a Greek play,
and invent several new readings. He had not yet selected the play, for
having been married little more than two years, his leisure time had
been much occupied with attentions to Mrs Stelling; but he had told
that fine woman what he meant to do some day, and she felt great
confidence in her husband, as a man who understood everything of that
sort.

But the immediate step to future success was to bring on Tom Tulliver
during this first half-year; for, by a singular coincidence, there had
been some negotiation concerning another pupil from the same
neighbourhood and it might further a decision in Mr Stelling’s favour,
if it were understood that young Tulliver, who, Mr Stelling observed in
conjugal privacy, was rather a rough cub, had made prodigious progress
in a short time. It was on this ground that he was severe with Tom
about his lessons; he was clearly a boy whose powers would never be
developed through the medium of the Latin grammar, without the
application of some sternness. Not that Mr Stelling was a
harsh-tempered or unkind man; quite the contrary. He was jocose with
Tom at table, and corrected his provincialisms and his deportment in
the most playful manner; but poor Tom was only the more cowed and
confused by this double novelty, for he had never been used to jokes at
all like Mr Stelling’s; and for the first time in his life he had a
painful sense that he was all wrong somehow. When Mr Stelling said, as
the roast-beef was being uncovered, “Now, Tulliver! which would you
rather decline, roast-beef or the Latin for it?” Tom, to whom in his
coolest moments a pun would have been a hard nut, was thrown into a
state of embarrassed alarm that made everything dim to him except the
feeling that he would rather not have anything to do with Latin; of
course he answered, “Roast-beef,” whereupon there followed much
laughter and some practical joking with the plates, from which Tom
gathered that he had in some mysterious way refused beef, and, in fact,
made himself appear “a silly.” If he could have seen a fellow-pupil
undergo these painful operations and survive them in good spirits, he
might sooner have taken them as a matter of course. But there are two
expensive forms of education, either of which a parent may procure for
his son by sending him as solitary pupil to a clergyman: one is the
enjoyment of the reverend gentleman’s undivided neglect; the other is
the endurance of the reverend gentleman’s undivided attention. It was
the latter privilege for which Mr Tulliver paid a high price in Tom’s
initiatory months at King’s Lorton.

That respectable miller and maltster had left Tom behind, and driven
homeward in a state of great mental satisfaction. He considered that it
was a happy moment for him when he had thought of asking Riley’s advice
about a tutor for Tom. Mr Stelling’s eyes were so wide open, and he
talked in such an off-hand, matter-of-fact way, answering every
difficult, slow remark of Mr Tulliver’s with, “I see, my good sir, I
see”; “To be sure, to be sure”; “You want your son to be a man who will
make his way in the world,”—that Mr Tulliver was delighted to find in
him a clergyman whose knowledge was so applicable to the everyday
affairs of this life. Except Counsellor Wylde, whom he had heard at the
last sessions, Mr Tulliver thought the Rev. Mr Stelling was the
shrewdest fellow he had ever met with,—not unlike Wylde, in fact; he
had the same way of sticking his thumbs in the armholes of his
waistcoat. Mr Tulliver was not by any means an exception in mistaking
brazenness for shrewdness; most laymen thought Stelling shrewd, and a
man of remarkable powers generally; it was chiefly by his clerical
brethren that he was considered rather a dull fellow. But he told Mr
Tulliver several stories about “Swing” and incendiarism, and asked his
advice about feeding pigs in so thoroughly secular and judicious a
manner, with so much polished glibness of tongue, that the miller
thought, here was the very thing he wanted for Tom. He had no doubt
this first-rate man was acquainted with every branch of information,
and knew exactly what Tom must learn in order to become a match for the
lawyers, which poor Mr Tulliver himself did not know, and so was
necessarily thrown for self-direction on this wide kind of inference.
It is hardly fair to laugh at him, for I have known much more highly
instructed persons than he make inferences quite as wide, and not at
all wiser.

As for Mrs Tulliver, finding that Mrs Stelling’s views as to the airing
of linen and the frequent recurrence of hunger in a growing boy
entirely coincided with her own; moreover, that Mrs Stelling, though so
young a woman, and only anticipating her second confinement, had gone
through very nearly the same experience as herself with regard to the
behaviour and fundamental character of the monthly nurse,—she expressed
great contentment to her husband, when they drove away, at leaving Tom
with a woman who, in spite of her youth, seemed quite sensible and
motherly, and asked advice as prettily as could be.

“They must be very well off, though,” said Mrs Tulliver, “for
everything’s as nice as can be all over the house, and that watered
silk she had on cost a pretty penny. Sister Pullet has got one like
it.”

“Ah,” said Mr Tulliver, “he’s got some income besides the curacy, I
reckon. Perhaps her father allows ’em something. There’s Tom ’ull be
another hundred to him, and not much trouble either, by his own
account; he says teaching comes natural to him. That’s wonderful, now,”
added Mr Tulliver, turning his head on one side, and giving his horse a
meditative tickling on the flank.

Perhaps it was because teaching came naturally to Mr Stelling, that he
set about it with that uniformity of method and independence of
circumstances which distinguish the actions of animals understood to be
under the immediate teaching of nature. Mr Broderip’s amiable beaver,
as that charming naturalist tells us, busied himself as earnestly in
constructing a dam, in a room up three pair of stairs in London, as if
he had been laying his foundation in a stream or lake in Upper Canada.
It was “Binny’s” function to build; the absence of water or of possible
progeny was an accident for which he was not accountable. With the same
unerring instinct Mr Stelling set to work at his natural method of
instilling the Eton Grammar and Euclid into the mind of Tom Tulliver.
This, he considered, was the only basis of solid instruction; all other
means of education were mere charlatanism, and could produce nothing
better than smatterers. Fixed on this firm basis, a man might observe
the display of various or special knowledge made by irregularly
educated people with a pitying smile; all that sort of thing was very
well, but it was impossible these people could form sound opinions. In
holding this conviction Mr Stelling was not biassed, as some tutors
have been, by the excessive accuracy or extent of his own scholarship;
and as to his views about Euclid, no opinion could have been freer from
personal partiality. Mr Stelling was very far from being led astray by
enthusiasm, either religious or intellectual; on the other hand, he had
no secret belief that everything was humbug. He thought religion was a
very excellent thing, and Aristotle a great authority, and deaneries
and prebends useful institutions, and Great Britain the providential
bulwark of Protestantism, and faith in the unseen a great support to
afflicted minds; he believed in all these things, as a Swiss
hotel-keeper believes in the beauty of the scenery around him, and in
the pleasure it gives to artistic visitors. And in the same way Mr
Stelling believed in his method of education; he had no doubt that he
was doing the very best thing for Mr Tulliver’s boy. Of course, when
the miller talked of “mapping” and “summing” in a vague and diffident
manner, Mr Stelling had set his mind at rest by an assurance that he
understood what was wanted; for how was it possible the good man could
form any reasonable judgment about the matter? Mr Stelling’s duty was
to teach the lad in the only right way,—indeed he knew no other; he had
not wasted his time in the acquirement of anything abnormal.

He very soon set down poor Tom as a thoroughly stupid lad; for though
by hard labour he could get particular declensions into his brain,
anything so abstract as the relation between cases and terminations
could by no means get such a lodgment there as to enable him to
recognise a chance genitive or dative. This struck Mr Stelling as
something more than natural stupidity; he suspected obstinacy, or at
any rate indifference, and lectured Tom severely on his want of
thorough application. “You feel no interest in what you’re doing, sir,”
Mr Stelling would say, and the reproach was painfully true. Tom had
never found any difficulty in discerning a pointer from a setter, when
once he had been told the distinction, and his perceptive powers were
not at all deficient. I fancy they were quite as strong as those of the
Rev. Mr Stelling; for Tom could predict with accuracy what number of
horses were cantering behind him, he could throw a stone right into the
centre of a given ripple, he could guess to a fraction how many lengths
of his stick it would take to reach across the playground, and could
draw almost perfect squares on his slate without any measurement. But
Mr Stelling took no note of these things; he only observed that Tom’s
faculties failed him before the abstractions hideously symbolised to
him in the pages of the Eton Grammar, and that he was in a state
bordering on idiocy with regard to the demonstration that two given
triangles must be equal, though he could discern with great promptitude
and certainty the fact that they were equal. Whence Mr Stelling
concluded that Tom’s brain, being peculiarly impervious to etymology
and demonstrations, was peculiarly in need of being ploughed and
harrowed by these patent implements; it was his favourite metaphor,
that the classics and geometry constituted that culture of the mind
which prepared it for the reception of any subsequent crop. I say
nothing against Mr Stelling’s theory; if we are to have one regimen for
all minds, his seems to me as good as any other. I only know it turned
out as uncomfortably for Tom Tulliver as if he had been plied with
cheese in order to remedy a gastric weakness which prevented him from
digesting it. It is astonishing what a different result one gets by
changing the metaphor! Once call the brain an intellectual stomach, and
one’s ingenious conception of the classics and geometry as ploughs and
harrows seems to settle nothing. But then it is open to some one else
to follow great authorities, and call the mind a sheet of white paper
or a mirror, in which case one’s knowledge of the digestive process
becomes quite irrelevant. It was doubtless an ingenious idea to call
the camel the ship of the desert, but it would hardly lead one far in
training that useful beast. O Aristotle! if you had had the advantage
of being “the freshest modern” instead of the greatest ancient, would
you not have mingled your praise of metaphorical speech, as a sign of
high intelligence, with a lamentation that intelligence so rarely shows
itself in speech without metaphor,—that we can so seldom declare what a
thing is, except by saying it is something else?

Tom Tulliver, being abundant in no form of speech, did not use any
metaphor to declare his views as to the nature of Latin; he never
called it an instrument of torture; and it was not until he had got on
some way in the next half-year, and in the Delectus, that he was
advanced enough to call it a “bore” and “beastly stuff.” At present, in
relation to this demand that he should learn Latin declensions and
conjugations, Tom was in a state of as blank unimaginativeness
concerning the cause and tendency of his sufferings, as if he had been
an innocent shrewmouse imprisoned in the split trunk of an ash-tree in
order to cure lameness in cattle. It is doubtless almost incredible to
instructed minds of the present day that a boy of twelve, not belonging
strictly to “the masses,” who are now understood to have the monopoly
of mental darkness, should have had no distinct idea how there came to
be such a thing as Latin on this earth; yet so it was with Tom. It
would have taken a long while to make conceivable to him that there
ever existed a people who bought and sold sheep and oxen, and
transacted the everyday affairs of life, through the medium of this
language; and still longer to make him understand why he should be
called upon to learn it, when its connection with those affairs had
become entirely latent. So far as Tom had gained any acquaintance with
the Romans at Mr Jacob’s academy, his knowledge was strictly correct,
but it went no farther than the fact that they were “in the New
Testament”; and Mr Stelling was not the man to enfeeble and emasculate
his pupil’s mind by simplifying and explaining, or to reduce the tonic
effect of etymology by mixing it with smattering, extraneous
information, such as is given to girls.

Yet, strange to say, under this vigorous treatment Tom became more like
a girl than he had ever been in his life before. He had a large share
of pride, which had hitherto found itself very comfortable in the
world, despising Old Goggles, and reposing in the sense of unquestioned
rights; but now this same pride met with nothing but bruises and
crushings. Tom was too clear-sighted not to be aware that Mr Stelling’s
standard of things was quite different, was certainly something higher
in the eyes of the world than that of the people he had been living
amongst, and that, brought in contact with it, he, Tom Tulliver,
appeared uncouth and stupid; he was by no means indifferent to this,
and his pride got into an uneasy condition which quite nullified his
boyish self-satisfaction, and gave him something of the girl’s
susceptibility. He was of a very firm, not to say obstinate, disposition,
but there was no brute-like rebellion and recklessness in his nature;
the human sensibilities predominated, and if it had occurred to him
that he could enable himself to show some quickness at his lessons, and
so acquire Mr Stelling’s approbation, by standing on one leg for an
inconvenient length of time, or rapping his head moderately against the
wall, or any voluntary action of that sort, he would certainly have
tried it. But no; Tom had never heard that these measures would
brighten the understanding, or strengthen the verbal memory; and he was
not given to hypothesis and experiment. It did occur to him that he
could perhaps get some help by praying for it; but as the prayers he
said every evening were forms learned by heart, he rather shrank from
the novelty and irregularity of introducing an extempore passage on a
topic of petition for which he was not aware of any precedent. But one
day, when he had broken down, for the fifth time, in the supines of the
third conjugation, and Mr Stelling, convinced that this must be
carelessness, since it transcended the bounds of possible stupidity,
had lectured him very seriously, pointing out that if he failed to
seize the present golden opportunity of learning supines, he would have
to regret it when he became a man,—Tom, more miserable than usual,
determined to try his sole resource; and that evening, after his usual
form of prayer for his parents and “little sister” (he had begun to
pray for Maggie when she was a baby), and that he might be able always
to keep God’s commandments, he added, in the same low whisper, “and
please to make me always remember my Latin.” He paused a little to
consider how he should pray about Euclid—whether he should ask to see
what it meant, or whether there was any other mental state which would
be more applicable to the case. But at last he added: “And make Mr
Stelling say I sha’n’t do Euclid any more. Amen.”

The fact that he got through his supines without mistake the next day,
encouraged him to persevere in this appendix to his prayers, and
neutralised any scepticism that might have arisen from Mr Stelling’s
continued demand for Euclid. But his faith broke down under the
apparent absence of all help when he got into the irregular verbs. It
seemed clear that Tom’s despair under the caprices of the present tense
did not constitute a nodus worthy of interference, and since this was
the climax of his difficulties, where was the use of praying for help
any longer? He made up his mind to this conclusion in one of his dull,
lonely evenings, which he spent in the study, preparing his lessons for
the morrow. His eyes were apt to get dim over the page, though he hated
crying, and was ashamed of it; he couldn’t help thinking with some
affection even of Spouncer, whom he used to fight and quarrel with; he
would have felt at home with Spouncer, and in a condition of
superiority. And then the mill, and the river, and Yap pricking up his
ears, ready to obey the least sign when Tom said, “Hoigh!” would all
come before him in a sort of calenture, when his fingers played
absently in his pocket with his great knife and his coil of whipcord,
and other relics of the past.

Tom, as I said, had never been so much like a girl in his life before,
and at that epoch of irregular verbs his spirit was further depressed
by a new means of mental development which had been thought of for him
out of school hours. Mrs Stelling had lately had her second baby, and
as nothing could be more salutary for a boy than to feel himself
useful, Mrs Stelling considered she was doing Tom a service by setting
him to watch the little cherub Laura while the nurse was occupied with
the sickly baby. It was quite a pretty employment for Tom to take
little Laura out in the sunniest hour of the autumn day; it would help
to make him feel that Lorton Parsonage was a home for him, and that he
was one of the family. The little cherub Laura, not being an
accomplished walker at present, had a ribbon fastened round her waist,
by which Tom held her as if she had been a little dog during the
minutes in which she chose to walk; but as these were rare, he was for
the most part carrying this fine child round and round the garden,
within sight of Mrs Stelling’s window, according to orders. If any one
considers this unfair and even oppressive toward Tom, I beg him to
consider that there are feminine virtues which are with difficulty
combined, even if they are not incompatible. When the wife of a poor
curate contrives, under all her disadvantages, to dress extremely well,
and to have a style of coiffure which requires that her nurse shall
occasionally officiate as lady’s-maid; when, moreover, her
dinner-parties and her drawing-room show that effort at elegance and
completeness of appointment to which ordinary women might imagine a
large income necessary, it would be unreasonable to expect of her that
she should employ a second nurse, or even act as a nurse herself. Mr
Stelling knew better; he saw that his wife did wonders already, and was
proud of her. It was certainly not the best thing in the world for
young Tulliver’s gait to carry a heavy child, but he had plenty of
exercise in long walks with himself, and next half-year Mr Stelling
would see about having a drilling-master. Among the many means whereby
Mr Stelling intended to be more fortunate than the bulk of his
fellow-men, he had entirely given up that of having his own way in his
own house. What then? He had married “as kind a little soul as ever
breathed,” according to Mr Riley, who had been acquainted with Mrs
Stelling’s blond ringlets and smiling demeanour throughout her maiden
life, and on the strength of that knowledge would have been ready any
day to pronounce that whatever domestic differences might arise in her
married life must be entirely Mr Stelling’s fault.

If Tom had had a worse disposition, he would certainly have hated the
little cherub Laura, but he was too kind-hearted a lad for that; there
was too much in him of the fibre that turns to true manliness, and to
protecting pity for the weak. I am afraid he hated Mrs Stelling, and
contracted a lasting dislike to pale blond ringlets and broad plaits,
as directly associated with haughtiness of manner, and a frequent
reference to other people’s “duty.” But he couldn’t help playing with
little Laura, and liking to amuse her; he even sacrificed his
percussion-caps for her sake, in despair of their ever serving a
greater purpose,—thinking the small flash and bang would delight her,
and thereby drawing down on himself a rebuke from Mrs Stelling for
teaching her child to play with fire. Laura was a sort of
playfellow—and oh, how Tom longed for playfellows! In his secret heart
he yearned to have Maggie with him, and was almost ready to dote on her
exasperating acts of forgetfulness; though, when he was at home, he
always represented it as a great favour on his part to let Maggie trot
by his side on his pleasure excursions.

And before this dreary half-year was ended, Maggie actually came. Mrs
Stelling had given a general invitation for the little girl to come and
stay with her brother; so when Mr Tulliver drove over to King’s Lorton
late in October, Maggie came too, with the sense that she was taking a
great journey, and beginning to see the world. It was Mr Tulliver’s
first visit to see Tom, for the lad must learn not to think too much
about home.

“Well, my lad,” he said to Tom, when Mr Stelling had left the room to
announce the arrival to his wife, and Maggie had begun to kiss Tom
freely, “you look rarely! School agrees with you.”

Tom wished he had looked rather ill.

“I don’t think I am well, father,” said Tom; “I wish you’d ask Mr
Stelling not to let me do Euclid; it brings on the toothache, I think.”

(The toothache was the only malady to which Tom had ever been subject.)

“Euclid, my lad,—why, what’s that?” said Mr Tulliver.

“Oh, I don’t know; it’s definitions, and axioms, and triangles, and
things. It’s a book I’ve got to learn in—there’s no sense in it.”

“Go, go!” said Mr Tulliver, reprovingly; “you mustn’t say so. You must
learn what your master tells you. He knows what it’s right for you to
learn.”

“I’ll help you now, Tom,” said Maggie, with a little air of
patronizing consolation. “I’m come to stay ever so long, if Mrs
Stelling asks me. I’ve brought my box and my pinafores, haven’t I,
father?”

“You help me, you silly little thing!” said Tom, in such high spirits
at this announcement that he quite enjoyed the idea of confounding
Maggie by showing her a page of Euclid. “I should like to see you doing
one of my lessons! Why, I learn Latin too! Girls never learn such
things. They’re too silly.”

“I know what Latin is very well,” said Maggie, confidently, “Latin’s a
language. There are Latin words in the Dictionary. There’s bonus, a
gift.”

“Now, you’re just wrong there, Miss Maggie!” said Tom, secretly
astonished. “You think you’re very wise! But ‘bonus’ means ‘good,’ as
it happens,—bonus, bona, bonum.”

“Well, that’s no reason why it shouldn’t mean ‘gift,’” said Maggie,
stoutly. “It may mean several things; almost every word does. There’s
‘lawn,’—it means the grass-plot, as well as the stuff pocket
handkerchiefs are made of.”

“Well done, little ’un,” said Mr Tulliver, laughing, while Tom felt
rather disgusted with Maggie’s knowingness, though beyond measure
cheerful at the thought that she was going to stay with him. Her
conceit would soon be overawed by the actual inspection of his books.

Mrs Stelling, in her pressing invitation, did not mention a longer time
than a week for Maggie’s stay; but Mr Stelling, who took her between
his knees, and asked her where she stole her dark eyes from, insisted
that she must stay a fortnight. Maggie thought Mr Stelling was a
charming man, and Mr Tulliver was quite proud to leave his little wench
where she would have an opportunity of showing her cleverness to
appreciating strangers. So it was agreed that she should not be fetched
home till the end of the fortnight.

“Now, then, come with me into the study, Maggie,” said Tom, as their
father drove away. “What do you shake and toss your head now for, you
silly?” he continued; for though her hair was now under a new
dispensation, and was brushed smoothly behind her ears, she seemed
still in imagination to be tossing it out of her eyes. “It makes you
look as if you were crazy.”

“Oh, I can’t help it,” said Maggie, impatiently. “Don’t tease me, Tom.
Oh, what books!” she exclaimed, as she saw the bookcases in the study.
“How I should like to have as many books as that!”

“Why, you couldn’t read one of ’em,” said Tom, triumphantly. “They’re
all Latin.”

“No, they aren’t,” said Maggie. “I can read the back of this,—‘History
of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.’”

“Well, what does that mean? You don’t know,” said Tom, wagging his
head.

“But I could soon find out,” said Maggie, scornfully.

“Why, how?”

“I should look inside, and see what it was about.”

“You’d better not, Miss Maggie,” said Tom, seeing her hand on the
volume. “Mr Stelling lets nobody touch his books without leave, and I
shall catch it, if you take it out.”

“Oh, very well. Let me see all your books, then,” said Maggie,
turning to throw her arms round Tom’s neck, and rub his cheek with her
small round nose.

Tom, in the gladness of his heart at having dear old Maggie to dispute
with and crow over again, seized her round the waist, and began to jump
with her round the large library table. Away they jumped with more and
more vigor, till Maggie’s hair flew from behind her ears, and twirled
about like an animated mop. But the revolutions round the table became
more and more irregular in their sweep, till at last reaching Mr
Stelling’s reading stand, they sent it thundering down with its heavy
lexicons to the floor. Happily it was the ground-floor, and the study
was a one-storied wing to the house, so that the downfall made no
alarming resonance, though Tom stood dizzy and aghast for a few
minutes, dreading the appearance of Mr or Mrs Stelling.

“Oh, I say, Maggie,” said Tom at last, lifting up the stand, “we must
keep quiet here, you know. If we break anything Mrs Stelling’ll make us
cry peccavi.”

“What’s that?” said Maggie.

“Oh, it’s the Latin for a good scolding,” said Tom, not without some
pride in his knowledge.

“Is she a cross woman?” said Maggie.

“I believe you!” said Tom, with an emphatic nod.

“I think all women are crosser than men,” said Maggie. “Aunt Glegg’s a
great deal crosser than uncle Glegg, and mother scolds me more than
father does.”

“Well, you’ll be a woman some day,” said Tom, “so you needn’t
talk.”

“But I shall be a clever woman,” said Maggie, with a toss.

“Oh, I dare say, and a nasty conceited thing. Everybody’ll hate you.”

“But you oughtn’t to hate me, Tom; it’ll be very wicked of you, for I
shall be your sister.”

“Yes, but if you’re a nasty disagreeable thing I shall hate you.”

“Oh, but, Tom, you won’t! I sha’n’t be disagreeable. I shall be very
good to you, and I shall be good to everybody. You won’t hate me
really, will you, Tom?”

“Oh, bother! never mind! Come, it’s time for me to learn my lessons.
See here! what I’ve got to do,” said Tom, drawing Maggie toward him and
showing her his theorem, while she pushed her hair behind her ears, and
prepared herself to prove her capability of helping him in Euclid. She
began to read with full confidence in her own powers, but presently,
becoming quite bewildered, her face flushed with irritation. It was
unavoidable; she must confess her incompetency, and she was not fond of
humiliation.

“It’s nonsense!” she said, “and very ugly stuff; nobody need want to
make it out.”

“Ah, there, now, Miss Maggie!” said Tom, drawing the book away, and
wagging his head at her, “You see you’re not so clever as you thought
you were.”

“Oh,” said Maggie, pouting, “I dare say I could make it out, if I’d
learned what goes before, as you have.”

“But that’s what you just couldn’t, Miss Wisdom,” said Tom. “For it’s
all the harder when you know what goes before; for then you’ve got to
say what definition 3 is, and what axiom V. is. But get along with you
now; I must go on with this. Here’s the Latin Grammar. See what you can
make of that.”

Maggie found the Latin Grammar quite soothing after her mathematical
mortification; for she delighted in new words, and quickly found that
there was an English Key at the end, which would make her very wise
about Latin, at slight expense. She presently made up her mind to skip
the rules in the Syntax, the examples became so absorbing. These
mysterious sentences, snatched from an unknown context,—like strange
horns of beasts, and leaves of unknown plants, brought from some
far-off region,—gave boundless scope to her imagination, and were all
the more fascinating because they were in a peculiar tongue of their
own, which she could learn to interpret. It was really very
interesting, the Latin Grammar that Tom had said no girls could learn;
and she was proud because she found it interesting. The most
fragmentary examples were her favourites. Mors omnibus est communis
would have been jejune, only she liked to know the Latin; but the
fortunate gentleman whom every one congratulated because he had a son
“endowed with such a disposition” afforded her a great deal of
pleasant conjecture, and she was quite lost in the “thick grove
penetrable by no star,” when Tom called out,—

“Now, then, Magsie, give us the Grammar!”

“Oh, Tom, it’s such a pretty book!” she said, as she jumped out of the
large arm-chair to give it him; “it’s much prettier than the
Dictionary. I could learn Latin very soon. I don’t think it’s at all
hard.”

“Oh, I know what you’ve been doing,” said Tom; “you’ve been reading the
English at the end. Any donkey can do that.”

Tom seized the book and opened it with a determined and business-like
air, as much as to say that he had a lesson to learn which no donkeys
would find themselves equal to. Maggie, rather piqued, turned to the
bookcases to amuse herself with puzzling out the titles.

Presently Tom called to her: “Here, Magsie, come and hear if I can say
this. Stand at that end of the table, where Mr Stelling sits when he
hears me.”

Maggie obeyed, and took the open book.

“Where do you begin, Tom?”

“Oh, I begin at ’Appellativa arborum,’ because I say all over again
what I’ve been learning this week.”

Tom sailed along pretty well for three lines; and Maggie was beginning
to forget her office of prompter in speculating as to what mas could
mean, which came twice over, when he stuck fast at Sunt etiam
volucrum.

“Don’t tell me, Maggie; Sunt etiam volucrum—Sunt etiam volucrum—ut
ostrea, cetus——”

“No,” said Maggie, opening her mouth and shaking her head.

“Sunt etiam volucrum,” said Tom, very slowly, as if the next words
might be expected to come sooner when he gave them this strong hint
that they were waited for.

“C, e, u,” said Maggie, getting impatient.

“Oh, I know—hold your tongue,” said Tom. “Ceu passer, hirundo;
Ferarum—ferarum——” Tom took his pencil and made several hard dots
with it on his book-cover—“ferarum——”

“Oh dear, oh dear, Tom,” said Maggie, “what a time you are! Ut——”

“Ut ostrea——”

“No, no,” said Maggie, “ut tigris——”

“Oh yes, now I can do,” said Tom; “it was tigris, vulpes, I’d
forgotten: ut tigris, volupes; et Piscium.”

With some further stammering and repetition, Tom got through the next
few lines.

“Now, then,” he said, “the next is what I’ve just learned for
to-morrow. Give me hold of the book a minute.”

After some whispered gabbling, assisted by the beating of his fist on
the table, Tom returned the book.

“Mascula nomina in a,” he began.

“No, Tom,” said Maggie, “that doesn’t come next. It’s Nomen non
creskens genittivo——”

“Creskens genittivo!” exclaimed Tom, with a derisive laugh, for Tom
had learned this omitted passage for his yesterday’s lesson, and a
young gentleman does not require an intimate or extensive acquaintance
with Latin before he can feel the pitiable absurdity of a false
quantity. “Creskens genittivo! What a little silly you are, Maggie!”

“Well, you needn’t laugh, Tom, for you didn’t remember it at all. I’m
sure it’s spelt so; how was I to know?”

“Phee-e-e-h! I told you girls couldn’t learn Latin. It’s Nomen non
crescens genitivo.”

“Very well, then,” said Maggie, pouting. “I can say that as well as you
can. And you don’t mind your stops. For you ought to stop twice as long
at a semicolon as you do at a comma, and you make the longest stops
where there ought to be no stop at all.”

“Oh, well, don’t chatter. Let me go on.”

They were presently fetched to spend the rest of the evening in the
drawing-room, and Maggie became so animated with Mr Stelling, who, she
felt sure, admired her cleverness, that Tom was rather amazed and
alarmed at her audacity. But she was suddenly subdued by Mr Stelling’s
alluding to a little girl of whom he had heard that she once ran away
to the gypsies.

“What a very odd little girl that must be!” said Mrs Stelling, meaning
to be playful; but a playfulness that turned on her supposed oddity was
not at all to Maggie’s taste. She feared that Mr Stelling, after all,
did not think much of her, and went to bed in rather low spirits. Mrs
Stelling, she felt, looked at her as if she thought her hair was very
ugly because it hung down straight behind.

Nevertheless it was a very happy fortnight to Maggie, this visit to
Tom. She was allowed to be in the study while he had his lessons, and
in her various readings got very deep into the examples in the Latin
Grammar. The astronomer who hated women generally caused her so much
puzzling speculation that she one day asked Mr Stelling if all
astronomers hated women, or whether it was only this particular
astronomer. But forestalling his answer, she said,—

“I suppose it’s all astronomers; because, you know, they live up in
high towers, and if the women came there they might talk and hinder
them from looking at the stars.”

Mr Stelling liked her prattle immensely, and they were on the best
terms. She told Tom she should like to go to school to Mr Stelling, as
he did, and learn just the same things. She knew she could do Euclid,
for she had looked into it again, and she saw what A B C meant; they
were the names of the lines.

“I’m sure you couldn’t do it, now,” said Tom; “and I’ll just ask Mr
Stelling if you could.”

“I don’t mind,” said the little conceited minx, “I’ll ask him myself.”

“Mr Stelling,” she said, that same evening when they were in the
drawing-room, “couldn’t I do Euclid, and all Tom’s lessons, if you were
to teach me instead of him?”

“No, you couldn’t,” said Tom, indignantly. “Girls can’t do Euclid; can
they, sir?”

“They can pick up a little of everything, I dare say,” said Mr
Stelling. “They’ve a great deal of superficial cleverness; but they
couldn’t go far into anything. They’re quick and shallow.”

Tom, delighted with this verdict, telegraphed his triumph by wagging
his head at Maggie, behind Mr Stelling’s chair. As for Maggie, she had
hardly ever been so mortified. She had been so proud to be called
“quick” all her little life, and now it appeared that this quickness
was the brand of inferiority. It would have been better to be slow,
like Tom.

“Ha, ha! Miss Maggie!” said Tom, when they were alone; “you see it’s
not such a fine thing to be quick. You’ll never go far into anything,
you know.”

And Maggie was so oppressed by this dreadful destiny that she had no
spirit for a retort.

But when this small apparatus of shallow quickness was fetched away in
the gig by Luke, and the study was once more quite lonely for Tom, he
missed her grievously. He had really been brighter, and had got through
his lessons better, since she had been there; and she had asked Mr
Stelling so many questions about the Roman Empire, and whether there
really ever was a man who said, in Latin, “I would not buy it for a
farthing or a rotten nut,” or whether that had only been turned into
Latin, that Tom had actually come to a dim understanding of the fact
that there had once been people upon the earth who were so fortunate as
to know Latin without learning it through the medium of the Eton
Grammar. This luminous idea was a great addition to his historical
acquirements during this half-year, which were otherwise confined to an
epitomised history of the Jews.

But the dreary half-year did come to an end. How glad Tom was to see
the last yellow leaves fluttering before the cold wind! The dark
afternoons and the first December snow seemed to him far livelier than
the August sunshine; and that he might make himself the surer about the
flight of the days that were carrying him homeward, he stuck twenty-one
sticks deep in a corner of the garden, when he was three weeks from the
holidays, and pulled one up every day with a great wrench, throwing it
to a distance with a vigor of will which would have carried it to
limbo, if it had been in the nature of sticks to travel so far.

But it was worth purchasing, even at the heavy price of the Latin
Grammar, the happiness of seeing the bright light in the parlour at
home, as the gig passed noiselessly over the snow-covered bridge; the
happiness of passing from the cold air to the warmth and the kisses and
the smiles of that familiar hearth, where the pattern of the rug and
the grate and the fire-irons were “first ideas” that it was no more
possible to criticise than the solidity and extension of matter. There
is no sense of ease like the ease we felt in those scenes where we were
born, where objects became dear to us before we had known the labour of
choice, and where the outer world seemed only an extension of our own
personality; we accepted and loved it as we accepted our own sense of
existence and our own limbs. Very commonplace, even ugly, that
furniture of our early home might look if it were put up to auction; an
improved taste in upholstery scorns it; and is not the striving after
something better and better in our surroundings the grand
characteristic that distinguishes man from the brute, or, to satisfy a
scrupulous accuracy of definition, that distinguishes the British man
from the foreign brute? But heaven knows where that striving might lead
us, if our affections had not a trick of twining round those old
inferior things; if the loves and sanctities of our life had no deep
immovable roots in memory. One’s delight in an elderberry bush
overhanging the confused leafage of a hedgerow bank, as a more
gladdening sight than the finest cistus or fuchsia spreading itself on
the softest undulating turf, is an entirely unjustifiable preference to
a nursery-gardener, or to any of those regulated minds who are free
from the weakness of any attachment that does not rest on a
demonstrable superiority of qualities. And there is no better reason
for preferring this elderberry bush than that it stirs an early memory;
that it is no novelty in my life, speaking to me merely through my
present sensibilities to form and colour, but the long companion of my
existence, that wove itself into my joys when joys were vivid.