The first result of his observations was to confirm his impression that Archibald was not idiotic. There was a certain sort of vacancy in the child's expression, but it was the vacancy of ignorance rather than of foolishness. And ignorant to a surprising degree he was. He had at no time been regarded as a boy of large attainments; but what he knew before his strange seizure was, to what he knew after it, as Bacon to a ploughman. Had he been newly born into the world, he could not have shown less acquaintance with it, so far as intellectual comprehension went; his father, mother, sister--all were alike strangers to him; he gazed at them with intent but unrecognizing eyes; he never looked up when his name was spoken, nor did he betray any sign of understanding the talk that went on around him. His own thoughts and wants were expressed by inarticulate sounds and by gestures; but the mystery of speech evidently interested him, and he studied the movements of the lips of those who spoke to him with a keen, grave scrutiny to them highly amusing--except in the case of his poor old Aunt Jane, who turned quite pale under his inquisition, and declared that he must be bewitched, for although he seemed to know nothing, yet he had the knowingest look of any child she ever saw. Herein Aunt Jane gave utterance to a fact that was beginning to be generally acknowledged. Whatever Archibald had lost, it was beyond dispute that he had somehow come into possession of a fund of native intelligence (the term "mother wit" seems inappropriate under the circumstances) to which he had heretofore been a stranger. He might have forgotten his own name, and the mother that bore him; but he had learned how to learn, and was for the first time in his life wide awake. This was very much like saying that he was a new boy in the old skin; and this, again, was little better than a euphemism for changeling. Was he a changeling after all? The sage old woman whom we have already quoted asserted confidently that he was, and that, however much he pretended to ignorance, he really knew vastly more than any plain human child did or ought to know. And as a warrant for this opinion they brought forward evidence that Master Archibald, having been left alone one day in the nursery, had been overheard humming to himself the words of a certain song--a thing, it was argued, which he could not have done had he known no words at all; and therefore he was a changeling.