He thought, nevertheless, he shouldn't care much to be a wrangler. One wrangler, he remembered, had come back to his own Highland parish to die. That was what wrangling had done for him.
Fred did not care a very great deal for either Latin or Greek, both of which languages he was already well versed in. But then Daddy Pop had told him—and didn't Daddy Pop know everything?—that learning and study made one active-minded, clever, and bright; that, in fact, it wasn't so much what anyone actually did learn as the actual learning of it, that did the good, and increased the size and fertility of the brain just as—and these were Daddy's own words—the ploughing and harrowing of a field fitted it to receive any sort of seed that might be sown therein. "But," Daddy Pop had added, "it is as well to learn what will be useful in after life, and the so-called dead languages would be so."
Fred perhaps ought to have gone to sleep as soon as he went to bed; but having once commenced to think he could not. He thought out all Daddy Pop's story, first lying on one side, then he rolled over on the other, and thought it all over again. Then, as it was getting late, he rolled over on his back and determined to sleep. Pah! he might as well have tried to fly.
"Well," he said to himself, "I don't see any good in lying here tumbling all the bed. It is hard work, and nothing good to show for."
So up he jumped, and drew aside his little window-blind. The window was in shadow; but he could sea that the moon was shining brightly over the sea, so he quietly dressed himself, opened wide the window, and sat down beside it.
Toddie's dachshund was out there under a bush, and coughed a low enquiring sort of a bark at him.
"Down, Tippetty, down!" said Fred.
Tippetty did lie down, but not without a little growl of displeasure.
"You ought to be in bed, you know," the little wise fellow appeared to say; "and I'm responsible for the safety of this establishment after nightfall."
Fred gave himself up to thought now, just as heartily as in bed he had tried to avoid it. Of course there was a little castle-building mixed up with these cogitations of his. And I would not care much for a boy who did not build a few castles in the air at times, and inhabit them too; for what, after all, is castle-building but a kind of budding ambition?