Greeting the tailor through his open window, where he sat cross-legged on his table, the shoemaker on his stool, which, this lovely summer morning, he had brought to the door of his cottage, and the smith in his nimbus of sparks, through the half-door of his smithy, and receiving from each a kindly response, the boy walked steadily on till he came to the school. There, on the heels of the master, the boys and girls were already crowding in, and he entered along with them. The religious preliminaries over, consisting in a dry and apparently grudging recognition of a sovereignty that required the homage, and the reading of a chapter of the Bible in class, the secular business was proceeded with; and Cosmo was sitting with his books before him, occupied with a hard passage in Cæsar , when the master left his desk and came to him.
“You’ll have to make up for lost time to-day, Cosmo,” he said.
Now if anything was certain to make Cosmo angry, it was the appearance, however slight, or however merely implied, of disapproval of anything his father thought, or did, or sanctioned. His face flushed, and he answered quickly,
“The time wasn’t lost, sir.”
This reply made the master in his turn angry, but he restrained himself.
“I’m glad of that! I may then expect to find you prepared with your lessons for to-day.”
“I learned my lessons for yesterday,” Cosmo answered; “but my father says it’s no play to learn lessons.”
“Your father’s not master of this school.”
“He’s maister o’ me,” returned the boy, relapsing into the mother-tongue, which, except it be spoken in good humour, always sounds rude.
The master took the youth’s devotion to his father for insolence to himself.