Jan shook his head again. “I don’t like school,” said he, “I likes being in the wood.”
The old man winced as if some one had struck him in the face, then he muttered, “The wood! Ay, to be sure! And such a school, too!”
Then he suddenly addressed Jan. “Do ye know me, my lad?”
“No, sir,” said Jan.
“Swift—Master Swift, they call me. You’ve heard tell of Master Swift, the schoolmaster?”
Jan shrank back. He had heard of Master Swift as a man whose stick was more to be dreaded than Dame Datchett’s strap, and of his school as a place where liberty was less than with the Dame.
“See thee!” said the old man, speaking broader and broader in his earnestness. “If thy father would send thee,—nay, what am I saying?—if I took thee for naught and gladly, thou’dst sooner come to the old schoolmaster and his books than stay with pigs, even in a wood? Eh, laddie? Will ye come to school?”
But the tradition of Master Swift’s severity was strong in Jan’s mind, and the wood was pleasant to him, and he only shrank back farther, and said, “No.” Children often give pain to their elders, of the intensity of which they have no measure; but, had Jan been older and wiser than he was, he might have been puzzled by the bitterness of the disappointment written on Master Swift’s countenance.
An involuntary impulse made the old man break the blow by doing something. With trembling fingers he folded his spectacles, and crammed them into the shagreen case. But, when that was done, he still found nothing to say, and he turned his back and went away in silence.
In silence Jan watched him, half regretfully, and strained his ears to catch something that Master Swift began again to recite:—