“My dear, you may bring Dorcas in, and we will begin with her. I really do not know whether I can teach her anything. She does not appear to be very intelligent.”
Before Roma had quite finished her speech Owlet had darted out of the room. In a very few minutes she returned with the little black child, who waddled into the room very much in movement like her namesake, the duck.
“You are going to learn to read, Ducky Darling! To read about all the pretty birds and beasts and things in the picture books I showed you,” said Owlet, as she helped the child to climb up on the chair, so much too high for her that her little black legs stuck straight out from the front of it.
“It is an experiment,” said Roma, as she took a card with only three capital letters on it—A B C—and put it in the hand of Dorcas, and told her the names of the signs, making her repeat them over and over again.
“Lady, don’t you take so much trouble. I can teach her the three letters and learn my own lesson, too,” said Owlet, drawing another chair close by the side of the one occupied by Ducky.
Roma took up her knitting, to which she had lately taken, as men take to cigars, or some women take to pipes, for the sedative effects, and she sat down in her easy-chair and knitted while she watched her pupils. Owlet was very zealous, and Ducky very docile, but the experiment was not a success—then, at least.
At the end of the two hours, which was the limit of the day’s learning, it was found that Owlet had paid so much attention to her little companion that she had not got her own lesson, while Ducky had chewed up her A B C card, in spite of all her little monitor’s vigilance.
For all the rest of the day Owlet made Ducky Darling her inseparable companion, with the exception of the hour when Hera came to carry off her child to her early dinner, only to discover later that Ducky Darling, immediately after her meal, had waddled back to the “big house” to join her friend, whom she never left until night, when she was again recaptured by her mother and carried off to supper and to bed.
The next day was Sunday, the first Sunday after Roma’s return home.
The morning was glorious—a jubilee of heaven and earth; the world flooded with sunshine; woods, groves and gardens in full leaf and blossom; the grass starred with daisies; the air full of the fragrance of flowers and the songs of birds.