He did the same this morning, but somehow his dreams were not quite so
undisturbed. He was no longer sure that he would like to lie there
always doing nothing but dreaming, and now that he had got this idea
into his head everything about him seemed to be repeating it. He looked
at the heather, faded and dull now, and remembered how, a while ago, the
bees had been hard at work on the moors gathering their stores. "What a
lot of trouble it must be to make honey!" he thought. He felt his own
little rough coat, and smiled to think that not so very long ago it had
been walking about the hills on a different back. "It isn't much trouble
for the sheep to let their wool grow, certainly," he said to himself,
"but it's a lot of work for lots of people before wool is turned into a
coat for a little boy. Nothing can be done without work, I suppose, and
I'd rather be a bee than a sheep a good deal, though I'd rather be old
Watch than either, and _he_ works hard--yes, he certainly does."
And then suddenly he remembered that if he didn't bestir himself he
would be late at school, which wouldn't be at all the good start his
mother had advised him to make as it was Monday morning.
He went on pretty steadily for the rest of the way, only stopping about
six times, and that not for long together, otherwise he certainly would
not have got to school before morning lessons were over. But, as it was,
he got an approving nod from the teacher for being in very good time.
For the teacher could not help liking Gratian, though, as a pupil, he
gave him plenty of trouble, seeming really sometimes as if he _could_
not learn.
"And yet," thought the master--for he was a young man who did
think--"one cannot look into the child's face without seeing there are
brains behind it, and brains of no common kind maybe. But I haven't got
the knack of making him use them; for nine years old he is exceedingly
stupid."
Things went better to-day. Gratian was full of his new ideas and really
meant to try. But even trying with all one's might and main won't build
Rome in a day. Gratian had idled and dreamed through lesson-time too
often to lose the bad habit all at once. He saw himself passed as usual
by children younger than he, who had been a much shorter time at school,
and his face grew very melancholy, and two or three big tears gathered
more than once in his eyes while he began to say in his own mind that
trying was no good.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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