Daffydowndilly began to cry.
“Oh, take me back! Take me back!” said he. “If there is nothing but toil in the world, I may as well go back to the school house!”
“Well, there it is,” said the stranger. And, sure enough, there it was.
You see they had been going in a circle, instead of a straight line.
“Come, we will go back to school together.”
Something in the stranger’s voice made Daffydowndilly look at him. There, again, was the face of old Mr. Toil! So the poor boy had been with him all day, even while he was trying so hard to get away from him.
When he came to know the schoolmaster better, he found that he was not so bad, after all. And when he learned his lessons well, the old schoolmaster’s smile was almost as pleasant as was that of his own mother.
- Transcriber’s Notes:
- Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.
- Typographical errors were silently corrected.
- Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only when a predominant form was found in this book.