Master Hulker is in that condition at Birch's. He is the most honest, kind, active, plucky, generous creature. He can do many things better than most boys. He can go up a tree, jump, play at cricket, dive and swim perfectly--he can eat twice as much as almost any lady (as Miss Birch well knows), he has a pretty talent at carving figures with his hack-knife, he makes and paints little coaches, he can take a watch to pieces and put it together again. He can do everything but learn his lesson; and there he sticks at the bottom of the school, hopeless. As the little boys are drafted in from Miss Raby's class, (it is true she is one of the best instructresses in the world,) they enter and hop over poor Hulker. He would be handed over to the governess only he is too big. Sometimes I used to think, that this desperate stupidity was a stratagem of the poor rascal's; and that he shammed dulness so that he might be degraded into Miss Raby's class: if she would teach _me_, I know, before George, I would put on a pinafore and a little jacket--but no, it is a natural incapacity for the Latin Grammar. If you could see his grammar, it is a perfect curiosity of dog's ears. The leaves and cover are all curled and ragged. Many of the pages are worn away, with the rubbing of his elbows as he sits poring over the hopeless volume, with the blows of his fists as he thumps it madly, or with the poor fellow's tears. You see him wiping them away with the back of his hand, as he tries and tries, and can't do it. When I think of that Latin Grammar, and that infernal As in Præsenti, and of other things which I was made to learn in my youth: upon my conscience I am surprised that we ever survived it. When one thinks of the boys who have been caned because they could not master that intolerable jargon! Good Lord, what a pitiful chorus these poor little creatures send up! Be gentle with them, ye schoolmasters, and only whop those who _won't_ learn. The Doctor has operated upon Hulker (between ourselves), but the boy was so little affected you would have thought he had taken chloroform. Birch is weary of whipping now, and leaves the boy to go his own gait. Prince, when he hears the lesson, and who cannot help making fun of a fool, adopts the sarcastic manner with Master Hulker, and says, "Mr. Hulker, may I take the liberty to inquire if your brilliant intellect has enabled you to perceive the difference between those words which grammarians have defined as substantive and adjective nouns?--if not, perhaps Mr. Ferdinand Timmins will instruct you." And Timmins hops over Hulker's head. I wish Prince would leave off girding at the poor lad. He's an only son, and his mother is a widow woman, who loves him with all her might. There is a famous sneer about the suckling of fools and the chronicling of small beer; but remember it was a rascal who uttered it. A WORD ABOUT MISS BIRCH.