“Miss Celia told me to. I’ll say ‘Confound it,’ if you like that better,” answered Ben, as a sly smile twinkled in his eyes.
“Oh, I see! She’s told you about it? Well, then, if you want to please her, you’ll learn a hymn right off. Come now, she wants me to be clever to you, and I’d like to do it; but if you get peppery, how can I?”
Thorny spoke in a hearty, blunt way, which suited Ben much better than the other, and he responded pleasantly:
“If you wont be grand I wont be peppery. Nobody is going to boss me but Miss Celia, so I’ll learn hymns if she wants me to.”
“‘In the soft season of thy youth’ is a good one to begin with. I learned it when I was six. Nice thing; better have it.” And Thorny offered the book like a patriarch addressing an infant.
Ben surveyed the yellow page with small favor, for the long s in the old-fashioned printing bewildered him, and when he came to the last two lines he could not resist reading them wrong:
“The earth affords no lovelier fight
Than a religious youth.”
“I don’t believe I could ever get that into my head straight. Haven’t you got a plain one anywhere round?” he asked, turning over the leaves with some anxiety.
“Look at the end and see if there isn’t a piece of poetry pasted in? You learn that, and see how funny Celia will look when you say it to her. She wrote it when she was a girl, and somebody had it printed for other children. I like it best, myself.”
Pleased by the prospect of a little fun to cheer his virtuous task, Ben whisked over the leaves and read with interest the lines Miss Celia had written in her girlhood: