“Wish I didn’t have to go to school,” said David, in a petulant voice that was most unusual with him; “I hate it.” “I can’t understand why you don’t like to study when you so love to read,” remarked Barbara. “You ought to do much better work in school; you’re not a bit stupid at home.” “I have ideas in my head,” said David, plaintively. “But when I get them out, they aren’t ideas.” “You do too much dreaming and too little studying. I can’t pull you away from books at home, but you don’t seem to be able to concentrate your mind on your school work.” “Lessons are so unint’resting,” said David. “If I was in history or mythology, now, I’d like those; but I only have reading and ’rithmetic and language and g’ography. I’ve read everything in my reader a million times, and every time we come to a beauteous sentence in our language lesson we have to chop it up into old parts of speech. I can’t do numbers at all, and I just hate g’ography!” “You like to read it at home.” “Yes, but that’s diff’runt. I always read about the people, and the animals, and what’s in the country, and what the inhabitants do, and how they live. But at school they make you tell all the mountain ranges from the northeast to the southwest of Asia, and the names are awful hard to learn. They’re just like eight times seven, and seven times nine: there doesn’t seem to be anything to make you remember them, but there’s a whole lot of things to make you forget them!” “Wait until you get into fractions,” said Gassy. “_Then_ you’ll see! ’Rithmetic is just planned to keep you guessing. When I was beginning addition, I thought that was all there was to learn, but afterwards I found that I’d only learned it so I could do subtraction. Everything you find out about just makes more things for you to study. I wish I’d stayed with my mind a blank,—like the Everett baby.” “Don’t worry about that,” said Jack, consolingly. “You haven’t strayed so far from that condition that you can’t find your way back.” There was a crackle of stiff white apron, a flash of thin, black legs, and Whiting’s Language Lessons went sailing through the air, its pages falling as it struck Jack’s head. “Now see what you’ve done, Spitfire!” said Jack. Two months before, this exhibition of temper would have been made the subject of a moral lecture from Barbara. Now she only looked sober as she bent to help Gassy pick up the leaves. “Poor book,” she said; “you’ve given it what Jack deserved. That’s hardly fair, is it? Come, Boy, help repair the damage that you caused. No, David, you needn’t help; I want you to go and get ready for school.” “Must I?” pleaded David. “I think you had better.” The little boy raised himself from the couch with a long-drawn sigh that Barbara remembered days afterward. “All right, if you say so,” he said: “I’ll change my waist now.”