Lovegood’s affection for the boy and girl gave him complete command of their attention; and his large scrupulousness, wide humanity, and great-heartedness had an even mightier educational force upon them both than the clear wits he brought to bear in luring them along the gritty path of the dry philosophy of numbers. In his hands geography and geology became a romance--an education in themselves; and science a glittering enchantment. He directed their reading in literature and history and government and statesmanship and social laws, which he put before all else for the training of the good citizen. Indeed he had only to guide--for they were greedy readers. He laid the classics at their feet, making them read good translations first, giving them a clear idea of the author’s relation to the times in which he wrote, and persuading the youngsters, after the mathematics were done in the morning, to run through some pages of the Latin or the Greek with him “to keep up the tune.” The boy’s wits awoke at once, roused as they had never been roused, to an eager curiosity about the very things that at school had but irked him and been an unmitigated weariness to him. He now found that the thing to be expressed was the important thing, whereas formerly, in the schoolroom, ranged in a row of some score of indifferent yawning others, he had been whipped into regarding the way of saying it as of the only interest--nay, the sole interest of the schoolmaster. To his profound astonishment, he found that these old books _meant_ something--that they were not exquisite torture-racks, appointed by some vague, hated, and arbitrary governance over them, for the mere racking of their wits in the cracking of the nuts of grammar--that it was what these old fellows had seen and known and felt and thought that was worth the thinking and the puzzling out, and _not_ the machinery of their thought. So that what had aforetime gone in at one ear and out at the other now lodged in the brain and painted pictures in the imagination that none might rub out. The boy had groaned over his Xenophon, until “Thence he advanced parasangs and stathmoi” had become the refrain of boredom as repulsive as the epileptic drivel of Revelation. He now discovered that the book contained one of the mighty adventures of the world. He stepped it out with Xenophon and the Ten Thousand in Cyrus’s march, listened to the camp scandals of the years ago, thrilled by the perplexities and endurance and dangers and hair’s-breadth escapes of the questionable undertaking; followed the great and dogged retreat; took a part in the passing incidents, hunting the bustards, tiring them down, and finding “the flesh of these birds very delicious.” He dawdled before Troy with the Homeric heroes, fought with them, listened to their gossip, bathed with them, sacrificed with them. The Latin tongue revealed other emotions than the frenzy of doubt as to whether Caius and Balbus should build unending walls.