"Don't ye be scairt of me, young feller," old Zack said to him. "I guess ye can teach me, for I don't know my letters yit!"
Master Cobb called the school to order and proceeded to ask the names and ages of his pupils. When Zack's turn came, the old fellow replied promptly:
"Zack Lurvey, fifty-eight years, five months and eighteen days."
"Zack?" the master queried in some perplexity. "Does that stand for Zachary? How do you spell it?"
"I never spelled it," old Zack replied with a grin. "I'm here to larn how. Fact is, I'm jest a leetle backward."
The young master began to realize that he was in for something extraordinary. In truth, he had the time of his life there that winter. Not that old Zack misbehaved; on the contrary, he was a model of studiousness and was very anxious to learn. But education went hard with him at first; he was more than a week in learning his letters and sat by the hour, making them on a slate, muttering them aloud, sometimes vehemently, with painful groans. M and W gave him constant trouble; and so did B and R. He grew so wrathful over his mistakes at times that he thumped the desk with his fist, and once he hurled his primer at the stove.
"Why did they make the measly little things look so much alike!" he cried.
He wished to skip the letters altogether and to learn to read by the looks of the words; but the master assured him that he must learn the alphabet first if he wished to learn to write later, and finally he prevailed with the stubborn old man.
"Well, I do want to larn," old Zack replied. "I'm goin' the whole hog, ef it kills me!"
And apparently it did pretty near kill him; at any rate he perspired over his work and at times was near shedding tears.