“Have you any brothers and sisters?”
“No; I wish I had; perhaps they would love me, and not laugh at me,” said Dominick, with tears in his eyes; “but I have no brothers but myself.”
One day Mr. Jones came into the schoolroom with an open letter in his hand, saying, “Here, you little Irish plockit, here’s a letter from your mother.”
The little Irish blockhead started from his form, and, throwing his grammar on the floor, leaped up higher than he or any boy in the school had ever been seen to leap before, and, clapping his hands, he exclaimed, “A letter from my mother! And will I hear the letter? And will I see her once more? And will I go home these holydays? Oh, then I will be too happy!”
“There’s no tanger of that,” said Mr. Owen ap Jones; “for your mother, like a wise ooman, writes me here, that py the atvice of your cardian, to oom she is coing to be married, she will not pring you home to Ireland till I send her word you are perfect in your Enclish crammer at least.”
“I have my lesson perfect, sir,” said Dominick, taking his grammar up from the floor; “will I say it now?”
“Will I say it now? No, you plockit, no; and I will write your mother word you have proke Priscian’s head four times this tay, since her letter came. You Irish plockit!” continued the relentless grammarian, “will you never learn the tifference between shall and will? Will I hear the letter, and will I see her once more? What Enclish is this, plockit?”
The Welsh boys all grinned, except Edwards, who hummed, loud enough to be heard, two lines of the good old English song,
“And will I see him once again?
And will I hear him speak?”
Many of the boys were fortunately too ignorant to feel the force of the quotation; but Mr. Owen ap Jones understood it, turned upon his heel, and walked off. Soon afterwards he summoned Dominick to his awful desk; and, pointing with his ruler to the following page in Harris’s Hermes, bade him “reat it, and understant it, if he could.” Little Dominick read, but could not understand.