“Is it a story?” he asked, eagerly.
“One of the best stories ever written, I think. It has made boys run away to sea, I’ve been told, but I don’t believe you will be harmed by it in that way. Seven-league boots would be needed to run away to sea from here. So we’ll risk reading it.”
He sat down and began to read; and the boy, standing close against his knees as on that first night, felt a strange warmth steal through him. He wanted to put his arms around the neck of this man; and when at length Clayton in shifting his position dropped a hand softly on the boy’s shoulder and let it rest there as he read on, the inner warmth so increased in the heart of the boy that he could hardly follow the story, fascinating as it was.
What may be called Justin’s course of instruction under Clayton began that day, after Clayton had talked with Wingate and asked the privilege of ordering certain books for Justin. The mail of a few days later brought “Treasure Island.”
“A wild book and a bloody one,” said Clayton, as he took it from its wrapping, while Justin looked on expectantly, “but a little wildness will be a good thing in this stagnation, and the blood in such a book doesn’t hurt a boy who isn’t bloody-minded. I think there must have been pirates who went about bludgeoning folks in the days of the cave-dwellers, and certainly books about pirates couldn’t have made those fellows what they were.”
It was a delight to instruct such a natural, inquisitive, imaginative boy as Justin. And the lessons were not confined to books. Clayton had a little glass which he slipped in and out of his pocket at intervals as he walked about with the boy. Looking through that glass the greenish stuff that appeared on the stones by the margin of the tepid stream was revealed as a beautiful green moss, the tufted head of a dusty weed was seen to be set with white lilies, and tiny specks became strange crawling and creeping things. Suddenly Justin had found that the very air, the earth, even the water in the tepid pools of the stream, swarmed with life, and it was an astonishing revelation. And everywhere was order, and beauty of form and coloring; for even a common rock, broken and viewed through that glass, showed beautiful diamond-like crystals.
One day Clayton plucked the leaf of a weed and holding it beneath the glass let Justin look at it.
“It’s covered all over with fuzzy hairs!”
Clayton plucked another of a different kind.
“Isn’t it funny? You can’t see them, only through the glass, but the edges are spiked, just as if there were little thorns set all along it!”