“They told me at school that my mother was living with a silversmith.”
“Who told you?”
“Everybody,” replied Quentin with a frown.
“And what did you do?”
“Fought ’em all!”
His mother said nothing more, but she withdrew Quentin from that school and took him to another, which was presided over by a dominie, and attended by a couple of dozen children.
The dominie was a secularized monk by the name of Piñuela—an old fossil full of musty prejudices. He was a strong partisan of the ancient pedagogic principle, so much beloved by our ancestors, of “La letra con la sangre entra” (Learn by the sweat of thy brow).
Dominie Piñuela was a ridiculous and eccentric individual. His nose was large, coarse, and flaming red: his under lip hung down: his great eyes, turbid, and bulging from their sockets like two eggs, were always watery: he wore a long, tight-fitting frock coat, which was once black, but now with the passage of time, covered with layers of dirt and grease and dandruff; narrow trousers, bagging loosely at the knees, and a black skull-cap.
Piñuela’s only store of knowledge consisted of Latin, rhetoric, and writing. His system of instruction was based on the division of the class into two groups, Rome and Carthage, a book of translations, and a Latin Grammar. Besides these educational mediums, the secularized monk counted upon the aid of a ferrule, a whip, a long bamboo stick, and a small leather sack filled with bird-shot.
Piñuela taught writing by the Spanish method, with the letters ending in points. To do this one had to know how to cut and trim quill pens; and few there were who had the advantage of the Dominie in this art.