Mrs. Milligan had placed her son in the shade and had taken a seat beside him.
"Now," she said to me, "you must take the dogs and the monkey away; we are going to work."
I went with the animals to the front of the boat.
What work could that poor little boy do?
I looked round and saw that his mother was making him repeat a lesson from a book she held in her hand. He seemed to be having great difficulty in mastering it, but his mother was very patient.
"No," she said at last, "Arthur, you don't know it, at all."
"I can't, Mamma, I just can't," he said, plaintively. "I'm sick."
"Your head is not sick. I can't allow you to grow up in utter ignorance because you're an invalid, Arthur."
That seemed very severe to me, yet she spoke in a sweet, kind way.