Quite little things, with their hair in curls, can tell you about tons and hundredweights, and how many horses it would take to draw a ton, and how many little girls to draw two-thirds of a ton, if so many little girls went to a horse; and if a horse were added, or a horse taken away, or two-eighths of the little girls, or three-fourths of the horse, or one-sixth of the ton,—until the room begins to spin breathlessly round and round, and I am left ever so far behindhand.
“Is avoirdupois an English word?” Up goes a little hand, with fingers working eagerly, and a pretty little creature, with long black hair and a necklace, cries out that it is French, and means, have weight.
Then the doctor asks about early English history, and the hands still go up, and they know all about it; and so they do about civilization, and despotism, and charters, and Picts and Scots, and dynasties, and early lawgivers, and colonization, and reformation.
“Who was Martin Luther? Why did he leave the Catholic Church? What were indulgences?”
“You gave the Pope lots of money, sir, and he gave you dispensations.” This was from our little portress.
There was another little shrimp of a thing, with wonderful, long-slit, flashing eyes, who could answer anything almost, and whom the other little girls accordingly brought forward in triumph from a back row.
“Give me an instance of a free country?” asks the tired questioner.
“England, sir!” cry the little girls in a shout.
“And now of a country which is not free.”