“No,” said Tommy Smith. He didn’t quite understand what the owl meant.
“Well,” said the owl—“mind, I’m going to say something very wise now (you know I’m an owl),—I put up with them.”
“Oh!” said Tommy Smith.
“Yes,” said the owl. “It will take you a very long time to find out what a wise remark that was. You couldn’t have made it, you know; I mean, of course, with the proper expression. I couldn’t myself once, when I was only a young owl, but now that I am grown up, and have a wife and family to assist me, I can.”
“Oh yes,” said Tommy Smith. (It was all he could think of to say.)
“You’ve no idea,” the owl went on, “what a time it takes one to make some remarks properly. Now take, for instance, the one, ‘It’s a sad world!’ It seems very easy, but even if you were to repeat it a hundred times a day for the next fortnight, you wouldn’t be able to say it in the way it ought to be said—like this,” and the owl snapped his beak, and said it again. “That sounds convincing,” he remarked; “but as for a little boy saying it in that way,—no, no.”
“Is it so very difficult,” said Tommy Smith.
“Well, it wants help,” said the owl; “that’s the principal thing. If you were left to yourself, you’d never manage it; but first one person helps you, and then another, until at last—after a good many years, you know—you get into the way of it. It’s like shrugging one’s shoulders. It takes one half a lifetime to do that—well.”
“Does it?” said Tommy Smith.
“Ask your father,” said the owl; “only you mustn’t expect him to make such a wise answer as I should, because, of course, he isn’t an owl, like me.”