The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, Volume 2 (of 2)Paltock, Robert
Science
The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, Volume 2 (of 2)
Paltock, Robert
Adventure stories; Fantasy fiction
were in England, you should be made a privy-councillor."--"What! won't
it do, then?" says he.--I told him we would try.--"I thought," says he,
"it would have done very well; for I marked one all about, and though I
could not see much at first, by that time I had made an end, that I did
first was quite of a different colour from the leaf, and I could see it
as plain as could be." I told him as he was of an age to comprehend what
I meant, I would take another method with him than with a child; so I
reasoned from sentences backwards to words, and from them to syllables,
and so on to letters. I then made one, the vowel A, told him its sound,
and added a consonant to it, and told him that part of the sound of each
distinct letter put together, as the two letters themselves were, made
another sound, which I called a syllable; and that joining two or more
of them together made a word, by putting the same letters together as
made the sounds of those syllables which made that word. Then setting
him a copy of letters, which with very little difficulty were to
be drawn upon the leaf, and telling him their sounds, I left him to
himself; and when he had done, though I named them but twice over, his
memory was so strong as to retain the sounds, as he called them, of
every one but F, L, and Q.
In two months' time I made him master of anything I wrote to him; and
as he delighted in it, he wrote a great deal himself, so that we kept
an epistolary correspondence, and he would set down all the common
occurrences of the day, as what he heard and saw, with his remarks on
divers things.
One day, as the king and I were walking in the gardens, and talking
of the customs of my country, and about our wars, telling him how our
soldiers fought on horseback, the king could not conceive what I meant
by a horse. I told him my wife had said there were neither beasts nor
fishes in the country; which I was very much surprised at, considering
how we abounded with both: "And therefore," says I, "to tell your
majesty that a horse is a creature with four legs, you must naturally
believe it to be somewhat like a man with four legs."--"Why, truly,"
says he, "I believe it is; but has it the graundee?" I could not forbear
smiling, even at his majesty, and wanted to find some similitude to
compare it to, to carry the king's mind that way; for else he would
sooner, I thought, conceive it like a tree or a mountain than what
it really was; and as I was musing, it came into my head I had given
Lasmeel a small print of a horse, which I found in one of the captain's
pockets at Graundevolet, and believing it to be the stamp of a
tobacco-paper, had kept it to please the children with; so I told the
king I believed I could show him the figure of a horse. He told me it
would much oblige him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account