"Ah!" said Mr. Laurence, with a curious look. "That's a wonderful check, isn't it? Quite right always to think of what your mother would like. And I'll tell you what, Somebody else wouldn't have liked it either. God wouldn't. We ought to be always ready to put ourselves in danger, if it's for the saving of somebody else."
Well, I saw Mr. Laurence any number of times after that. When Mr. Bertram was at home, he was often coming in; and even when Mr. Bertram was at school he never let a week pass without a call. Now and then, if he was walking through the garden, he would stop where I was, and would ask me a lot of questions, and sometimes he would get me to ask him questions, and he would answer them.
I never saw anybody who seemed to know such an amount about everything as Mr. Laurence. You couldn't ask him a question that took him by surprise. If he didn't know exactly what you wanted to hear, he would say so; but he always knew something about it. He had been reading hard, and studying hard, all his life, and this was the outcome. Not reading books only, but studying the things around him, and looking into Nature for himself, till it was wonderful the lot of knowledge that he had got together.
All my life I had been fond of books and of learning. I think I had that from my mother, and she often said she'd like to make a "scholar" of me. But it was seeing and hearing Mr. Laurence that first made me feel how little people in general know, and how much there is to be known, if only we would take the trouble to learn.
For the world around us is full of beautiful and extraordinary things, and the more we examine into them the more we see how beautiful and extraordinary they are; and yet ninety-nine men in a hundred walk through life blind and deaf to all they might see and hear.
One day, Mr. Laurence bade me look at the clouds,—white fleecy clouds,—scurrying over the sky, driven by a sharp breeze; with little firm white clouds between, not seeming to move at all. I had not been noticing them, but when I began to look I saw all at once how beautiful they were, with the blue sky beyond.
"What are those clouds made of?" Mr. Laurence asked.
Of course I didn't know; how should I? Nobody had ever told me. I had never even heard the question put before.
"Those lower clouds, moving so quickly, are made of fine mist," said he; "mist like a thick fog, or like the thick white mist which cools out of the hot steam leaving the funnel of a steam-engine."
I had always thought that was smoke, and I said so.