"Thank you, sir," said the boy, and the master turned away. Then a thought struck him.
"What do you best like doing, Gratian?"
The boy hesitated. Then he grew a little red.
"It isn't doing anything really," he said; "it's what mother calls dreaming—out on the moors, sir, that's the best of all—with the wind all about, and nothing but it and the moor and the sky. And the feel of it keeps in me. Even when I'm at home in the kitchen by the fire, if I shut my eyes I can fancy it."
The master nodded his head.
"Dreaming is no harm in its right place. But if one did nothing but dream, the dreams would lose their colour, I expect."
"That's something like what they said, again," thought the boy to himself.
The schoolmaster walked away. "A child with something uncommon about him, I fancy," he said in his mind. "One sees that sometimes in a child living as much alone with nature as he does. But I scarcely think he's clever, and then the rough daily life will most likely nip in the bud any sort of poetry or imagination that there may be germs of."
He didn't quite understand Gratian, and then, too, he didn't take into account what it is to be born under the protection of the four winds of heaven.
But Gratian felt much happier after his talk with the master, and afternoon lessons went better. They were generally easier than the morning ones, and often more interesting. This afternoon it was a geography lesson. The master drew out the great frame with the big maps hanging on it, and explained to the children as he went along. It was about the north to-day, far away up in the north, where the ice-fields spread for hundreds of miles and everything is in a sleep of whiteness and silence. And Gratian listened with parted lips and earnest eyes. He seemed to see it all. "I wish I knew as much as he does," he thought. "I wish I could read it in books to myself."