“I do understand that, sir.”
“Very well,” returned Mr. Simon, without showing any special satisfaction, and immediately handed him another.
This was again a non-luminous body, and indeed cast a shadow over the face of the embryo student. One by one Mr. Simon handed him all he held. Out of the score there were three Cosmo said he understood, and four he thought he should understand if he were allowed to read them over two or three times. But Mr. Simon laid them all together again, and back into the drawer.
“Now I shall know what I am about,” he said. “Tell me what you have been doing at school.”
Were my book a treatise on education, it might be worth while to give some account of Peter Simon’s ways of furthering human growth. But intellectual development is not my main business or interest, and I mean to say little more concerning Cosmo’s than that, after about six weeks’ work, the boy one day begged Mr. Simon to let him look at those papers again, and found to his delight that he understood all but three or four of them.
That first day, Mr. Simon gave him an ode of Horace, and a poem by Wordsworth to copy—telling him to put in every point as it was in the book exactly, but to note any improvement he thought might be made in the pointing. He told him also to look whether he could see any resemblance between the two poems.
As he sat surrounded by the many books, Cosmo felt as if he were in the heart of a cloud of witnesses.
That first day was sufficient to make the heart of the boy cleave to his new master. For one thing Mr. Simon always, in anything done, took note first of the things that pleased him, and only after that proceeded to remark on the faults—most of which he treated as imperfections, letting Cosmo see plainly that he understood how he had come to go wrong.
Such an education as Mr. Simon was thus attempting with Cosmo, is hardly to be given to more than one at a time; and indeed there are not a great many boys on whom it would be much better than lost labour. Cosmo, however, was now almost as eager to go to his lessons, as before to spend a holiday. Mr. Simon never gave him anything to do at home, heartily believing it the imperative duty of a teacher to leave room for the scholar to grow after the fashion in which he is made, and that what a boy does by himself is of greater import than what he does with any master. Such leisure may indeed be of comparatively small consequence with regard to the multitude of boys, but it is absolutely necessary wherever one is born with his individuality so far determined, as to be on the point of beginning to develop itself. When Cosmo therefore went home, he read or wrote what he pleased, wandered about at his will, and dreamed to his heart’s content. Nor was it long before he discovered that his dreams themselves were becoming of greater import to him—that they also were being influenced by Mr. Simon. And there were other witnesses there, quite as silent as those around him in the library, and more unseen, who would not remain speechless or invisible always.
One day Cosmo came late, and to say there were traces of tears on his cheeks would hardly be correct, for his eyes were swollen with weeping. His master looked at him almost wistfully, but said nothing until he had settled for a while to his work, and was a little composed. He asked him then what was amiss, and the boy told him. To most boys it would have seemed small ground for such heart-breaking sorrow.