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's 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
philosophize 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 its
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 Stepington--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 a hundred, you would have set it in a flowerpot on your table, no
bigger than it was at five,--a curiosity for its maturity 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, vigor 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."
