But to go back to Miss Jencks and Caliban. It was Harriet Buxton who had suggested that the boy was not so deaf as we had thought, only stupid, and that his dumbness might yield to the methods then being so successfully used with that afflicted child who has since triumphed so brilliantly over more than human obstacles. Although, as Harriet pointed out, I have always felt that too much credit was given in that case to the pupil and too little to the teacher. The distance between English words of one syllable and Greek tragedy is only a matter of time: the distance between blank chaos and those one-syllabled words might well have seemed eternal! Not that Miss Jencks had quite such a task ahead of her. Caliban had been trained into habits of relentless cleanliness, and an almost mechanical regularity of routine work. It was his clumsy hands that had arranged the flaming nasturtiums in the silver bowl under the Henner etching, his rude pantomime that purchased the bi-weekly bone for the mysteriously named Rosy, his weather wisdom that was sought when it was a question of an extended sailing party. In fact, I am inclined to think, in view of his subsequent progress, that some of his ignorance was feigned, as is often the case in these instances of arrested mental development. However that may have been, on the occasion of this visit I found him marvellously improved, his hair cut, his nondescript garments evolved into a modest sort of livery, his vocabulary no longer a series of grunts, his very pantomime more elastic. Margarita never changed her old methods of communication with him, but the rest of us, at Miss Jencks's earnest entreaty, fatigued ourselves amiably in order to elicit the guttural "yes" and "no" and "do not know" she had so laboriously taught him. Best of all, his disposition had altered to a very considerable extent, and this improvement on his old surliness was of the greatest assistance to us on the occasion I must now narrate.