"Bravo!" cried Herr Schuler: "at this rate, I will soon put you in a way to become such a man as your country will be proud of."
But Herr Schuler's resolution failed him. Although he had whipped many a rough and heedless scholar into better manners by his long stick, his kind heart and his just soul recoiled from the thought of punishing so steady and earnest a boy as Rick had become, for trivial faults of which the boy himself was unconscious. It was Rick himself who next referred to the rod.
"It is two weeks since I have had a birch lesson," he said.
"Ah! h'm!" replied Herr Schuler, getting up and going to the closet very reluctantly. "So you want another birch lesson, so soon?"
He took down the stick, and then resumed his seat in front of Rick.
"What was that you were telling little Jean Pettis, when you first came this morning? Did you not say that you had seen an elephant as high as my barn, and that you rode upon his back with about a hundred other children?"
"Well, he was a very large elephant."
"Was he as high as my barn?"
"Why, he was almost as high, I think."
"Look out of the window at the barn, and tell me, truly as you can, about how high you really think the elephant would reach."