"No, thanks—we makes it."
I have great respect for missionaries, but I have always strongly objected to boys who make up their minds to be missionaries before they are twelve years old.
Some good, straightforward boys are wholly destitute of humor. One of them had once to put into French the following sentence of Charles Dickens: "Mr. Squeers had but one eye, and the popular prejudice runs in favor of two." He said he could not put this phrase into French, because he did not know what it meant in English.
"Surely, sir," he said to me, "it is not a prejudice to prefer two eyes to one."
This boy was wonderfully good at facts, and his want of humor did not prevent him from coming out of Cambridge senior classic, after successfully taking his B.A. and M.A. in the University of London.
This young man, I hear, is also going to be a missionary. The news goes far to reconcile me to the noble army of John Bull's colonizing agents, but I doubt whether the heathen will ever get much entertainment out of him.
Some boys can grasp grammatical facts and succeed in writing a decent piece of French; but, through want of literary perception, they will give you a sentence that will make you feel proud of them until you reach the end, when, bang! the last word will have the effect of a terrible bump on your nose.
A boy of this category had to translate this other sentence of Dickens: [ [2] ] "She went back to her own room, and tried to prepare herself for bed. But who could sleep? Sleep!" [ [3] ]