“And hoo isn’t so very strong, neether,” he added mournfully, as if to discourage my abduction of Lizzie: “doctor says as hoo had ought to ’ave a iron tunic.” I hastily agreed, and then pondered on Lizzie, thus armour-clad, strait-waistcoated--_inclusam Danaen turris aenea_--ah, to be sure, “_tonic_,” iron tonic, much more suitable. Robert did not notice my hesitation: he had picked up a big stone, and in throwing it behind him had disturbed the peace of a tom blackbird, who fled, using language that would have brought a blush to the bill of a Melbourne cockatoo. I went on to remark that the little ones seemed very happy with Miss Jones, and that Mr. Birch was a good master. Robert agreed: things were improved since his time, and the little ’uns would as lief go to school as stop at home, when they had once got over the scare of the first week. “When I was a lad,” he continued; and I modify his dialect for general convenience, “at one time we had a Scotchman for schoolmaster. Squire had heard as the Scotch were great at eddication, and he advertised, and got McDougall, as they called him. But I reckon squire was a bit took in, for we soon found out as old Mac wasn’t so wise as he looked. It was in the reading lessons that we first caught him: there were some of the top lads as were pretty tidy readers, but now and again they’d come to a long word, as would pull ’em up short, same as if you’d struck your spade again a stone in digging; and they’d stop, and wait for Mac to give ’em a hand over. But they never got nowt off ’im: ’ee’d only the one answer, and that were, ‘Hop that, cocky, it’s Laa-tin’: and after a bit we got to understand, and we’d laugh, and he’d get mad. Well, one day in one of them lessons he comes to a middlin’ hard word, not so bad but what he could tell it himself: ‘Now, lads,’ he says, ‘what does this word mean?’ ‘Magazine’ it was, I remember as if it were yesterday: and Tom Jackson, he grins, and he says, ‘Please, sir, it’s Lahtin,’ and we laughed a good ’un. Eh, but Mac were wild, and he gives Tom what-for with what he called the tawse, a bit of broad leather with a hole in it, and Tom took and told his father, old Tummas, the blacksmith, of this newfangled way of thrashing a lad; and old Tummas, he goes down to skule to have it out with the gaffer. McDougall was settin’ in his own parlour with a black bottle by his side, and little Jenny Williams was keepin’ skule till he’d done his pipe and glass. ‘Hey, gaffer,’ Tummas says, when he come inside; ‘thou’st been a ’ammerin’ our Tom wi’ a strap wi’ a ’ole in it, ’stead of a stick, and ah wunna ’ave it,’ he says: ‘whoy what dost think ash-plants was growed for?’