“I can read a bit, Gearge,” said Abel, with pride; “but I’ve been at home a goodish while; but mother says she’ll send I to school again in spring, if the little un gets on well and walks.”
“I wish I could read,” said George, mournfully; “but time’s past for me to go to school, Abel; and who’d teach a great lummakin vool like I his letters?”
“I would, Gearge, I would!” cried Abel, his eyes sparkling with earnestness. “I can teach thee thy letters, and by the time thee’s learned all I know, maybe I’ll have been to school again, and learned some more.”
This was the foundation of a curious kind of friendship between Abel and the miller’s man.
On the same shelf with the “Vamly Bible,” before alluded to, was a real old horn-book, which had belonged to the windmiller’s grandmother. It was simply a sheet on which the letters of the alphabet, and some few words of one syllable, were printed, and it was protected in its frame by a transparent front of thin horn, through which the letters could be read, just as one sees the prints through the ground-glass of “drawing slates.”
From this horn-book Abel labored patiently in teaching George his letters. It was no light task. George had all the cunning and shrewdness with which he credited himself; but a denser head for any intellectual effort could hardly have been found for the seeking. Still they struggled on, and as George went about the mill he might have been heard muttering,—
“A B C G. No! Cuss me for a vool! A B C D. Why didn’t they whop my letters into I when a was a boy? A B C”—and so persevering with an industry which he commonly kept for works of mischief.
One evening he brought home a newspaper from the Heart of Oak, and when Mrs. Lake had taken the baby, he persuaded Abel to come into the round-house and give him a lesson. Abel could read so much of it that George was quite overwhelmed by his learning.
“Thee be’s mortal larned, Abel, sartinly. But I’ll never read like thee,” he added, despairingly. “Drattle th’ old witch; why didn’t she give I some schooling?” He spoke with spiteful emphasis, and Abel, too well used to his rough language to notice the uncivil reference to his mother, said with some compassion,—
“Were you never sent to school then, Gearge?”