"No, sir," said the boy, hanging his head again. "Well, then, wait a while and see if you don't change about books and lessons." "And if I don't ever change," said Gratian earnestly. "Can people ever do things well that they don't like doing?" The schoolmaster looked at him. It was a curious question for a boy of nine years old. "Yes," he said, "I hope so, indeed," and his mind went back to a time when he had looked forward to being something very different from a village schoolmaster, when he could have fancied no employment could be less to his liking than teaching. "I hope so, indeed," he repeated. "And if you work with a will you--get to like the work whatever it is." "Thank you, sir," said the boy, and the master turned away. Then a thought struck him. "What do you best like doing, Gratian?" The boy hesitated. Then he grew a little red. "It isn't doing anything really," he said; "it's what mother calls dreaming--out on the moors, sir, that's the best of all--with the wind all about, and nothing but it and the moor and the sky. And the feel of it keeps in me. Even when I'm at home in the kitchen by the fire, if I shut my eyes I can fancy it." The master nodded his head. "Dreaming is no harm in its right place. But if one did nothing but dream, the dreams would lose their colour, I expect." "That's something like what _they_ said, again," thought the boy to himself. The schoolmaster walked away. "A child with something uncommon about him, I fancy," he said in his mind. "One sees that sometimes in a child living as much alone with nature as he does. But I scarcely think he's clever, and then the rough daily life will most likely nip in the bud any sort of poetry or imagination that there may be germs of." He didn't quite understand Gratian, and then, too, he didn't take into account what it is to be born under the protection of the four winds of heaven. But Gratian felt much happier after his talk with the master, and afternoon lessons went better. They were generally easier than the morning ones, and often more interesting. This afternoon it was a geography lesson. The master drew out the great frame with the big maps hanging on it, and explained to the children as he went along. It was about the north to-day, far away up in the north, where the ice-fields spread for hundreds of miles and everything is in a sleep of whiteness and silence. And Gratian listened with parted lips and earnest eyes. He seemed to see it all. "I wish I knew as much as he does," he thought. "I wish I could read it in books to myself." And for the first time there came home to him a faint, shadowy feeling of what books are--of the treasures buried in the rows and rows of little black letters that he so often wished had never been invented. "Yes," he said to himself, "I'll try to learn so that I can read it all to myself."