"Doing your sums?" he asked, with a friendly smile. "Let's see if you do them the way I was taught when I was a lad." He held out his hand for the slate. There had been a bond of sympathy between the two ever since Christmas eve, when a certain pair of skates had changed owners, and now, although the boy's voice trembled almost out of his control, he managed to stammer out the reply that he was trying to write a composition.
The old man looked from the straggling lines on the slate, then at the open almanac, then down at the boy's troubled face, and understood. Drawing a chair across the porch he sat down beside him, and, catching the furtive, scared side-glance cast in his direction, he plunged at once into a story.
It was about a shepherd boy who went out to fight a giant, and the king insisted on lending him his armour. But he couldn't fight in the heavy helmet and the coat of mail. The shield was in his way, and the spear more than he could lift. So he threw it aside, and going down to a little brook, chose five small pebbles, worn smooth by the running water. And with these in his hand, and only the simple sling he was accustomed to use every day, he went out against the Philistine giant, and slew him in the first round.
Perkins's oldest wondered what the story had to do with his composition. He wasn't looking for a personal application. He had not been brought up at Sunday schools and kindergartens. But all of a sudden he realised that the miller meant him; that his depending on Tommy, or the customers, or the almanac, to furnish him ideas, was like going out in Saul's armour, and that he could only come to failure in that, because it wouldn't fit him; that he could hit the mark the little schoolmistress had in mind for him, only with the familiar sling-shot of his own common every-day personal experiences.
Maybe the old miller recognised that it was a crisis in the little fellow's life, for he stayed beside him with helpful hints and questions, until the slate was full. When he carried it home in the gloaming it no longer bore the items from the almanac. There were other remarks straggling across it, not so well expressed, perhaps, but plainly original. They were to the effect that September is the month you've got to go back to school when you don't want to, 'cos it's the nicest time of all to stay out-doors, neither too hot nor too cold. There's lots of apples then, and it's the minister's birthday. He's the seventh son of a seventh son, and Dick Wiggins says if you're that you can pick Wahoo berries in the dark of the moon and make med'cine out of them, that will cure the bone-break fever every time, when nothing else in the world will. Then followed several items of information that he had discovered for himself, in his prowls through the September woods, about snakes and tree-toads, as to their habits at that season of the year. It closed with a suggestive allusion to the delights of sucking cider from the bung of a barrel through a straw.
Next day the little schoolmistress shook her head over the composition that Riley Hines handed in, and laid it aside with a hopeless sigh. She recognised too plainly the hand of Maria in its construction. The sentiments expressed therein were as foreign to Riley's nature as they would have been to a woodchuck's. She took up Tommy Bowser's. Alas, four-syllabled words were not in Tommy's daily vocabulary, nor were the elegant sentences under his name within the power of his composition. Plainly it was the work of a plagiarist.
She went through the pile slowly, and then wrote on the blackboard as she had promised, the names of the ten whose work was the best and most original. It was then that Perkins's oldest had the surprise of his life, for lo! his name, like Abou-ben-Adhem's, "led all the rest."
Again the Cross-Roads had taught him more than the school,—to depend on the resources to which nature had adapted him, and never again to attempt to sally forth in borrowed armour, even though it be a king's.