The only thing Ruth was really slow about was figures. Mr. Gaynor was very quick and could not seem to understand it.
"You must learn," he would say. "I may get old and lose my eyesight, then you'll have to do my clerking."
So we used to labor with her. She knew her tables, children learned them perfectly in those days, but there was some little knack of applying them in which she seemed deficient. And when we were alone she would say:
"Oh, don't bother. Let us read. When I am grown up it will all come easy enough," and her winsome smile always persuaded me.
Mr. Harris had loaned me "Pope's Iliad," recommended it to me, in fact. When I had gone about half through I was so enchanted that I brought it to her, and turned back that we might share it together. How wonderful it seemed to us! We took it in as every word true. These were the people who lived long before America was discovered, long before William the Norman crossed over to Britain.
"But I do wonder if men must always fight," she said with a sigh.
We were at peace then except for an occasional Indian skirmish, but these glowing descriptions did stir my blood.
Then there was an old copy of the "Morte d'Arthur" that we revelled in. And there were outside enjoyments, rambles about on Sunday afternoons that we did not keep as strictly as the people to the eastward. Mr. Gaynor was full of funny stories about the old blue laws, as they were called, of having a hen put to death because she laid an egg on Sunday. But one that amused us very much was the old couplet:
"The deacon, he whipped the barrel of beer
Because it worked on Sunday."