“Never learned?” said Tom, in amazement. “Why, when I make dogs and horses, and those things, the heads and the legs won’t come right; though I can see how they ought to be very well. I can make houses, and all sorts of chimneys,—chimneys going all down the wall,—and windows in the roof, and all that. But I dare say I could do dogs and horses if I was to try more,” he added, reflecting that Philip might falsely suppose that he was going to “knock under,” if he were too frank about the imperfection of his accomplishments.
“Oh, yes,” said Philip, “it’s very easy. You’ve only to look well at things, and draw them over and over again. What you do wrong once, you can alter the next time.”
“But haven’t you been taught anything?” said Tom, beginning to have a puzzled suspicion that Philip’s crooked back might be the source of remarkable faculties. “I thought you’d been to school a long while.”
“Yes,” said Philip, smiling; “I’ve been taught Latin and Greek and mathematics, and writing and such things.”
“Oh, but I say, you don’t like Latin, though, do you?” said Tom, lowering his voice confidentially.
“Pretty well; I don’t care much about it,” said Philip.
“Ah, but perhaps you haven’t got into the Propria quæ maribus,” said Tom, nodding his head sideways, as much as to say, “that was the test; it was easy talking till you came to that.”
Philip felt some bitter complacency in the promising stupidity of this well-made, active-looking boy; but made polite by his own extreme sensitiveness, as well as by his desire to conciliate, he checked his inclination to laugh, and said quietly,—
“I’ve done with the grammar; I don’t learn that any more.”
“Then you won’t have the same lessons as I shall?” said Tom, with a sense of disappointment.