“So I will,” replied Marcus; “but I want you to do what you can, first, without my help. After you have made your first draft, we will go over it together, and see what improvements we can make in it.”
“But I can’t do it—I don’t know where to begin,” pleaded Ronald.
“O, yes, you can,” replied Marcus. “Write it out just as you explained it to me, and that will he a good beginning.”
Ronald at length mustered courage enough to make the attempt. His dialogue was of course quite imperfect, but it served as a good basis for Marcus to work upon. Two or three evenings were spent over it, by the joint authors, before it was pronounced satisfactory. When completed, the ideas and incidents of the piece were for the most part Ronald’s, while they were indebted to Marcus for much of the language in which they were clothed, and for the general arrangement they assumed.
The following is a copy of the dialogue, as it read when completed. The part which Ronald decided to take was that of “Joseph Foot,” as his powers of mimicry enabled him to imitate the backwoods dialect very successfully:
HEAD AND FOOT.
Scene—A school-room, with a class of ten or twelve boys, seated on a bench. Principal Characters—John Head, who is at the head of the class, and Joseph Foot, a wonderfully good-natured backwoods lad, who is at the other extremity.
Head [rising, and holding in his hand something concealed in a cloth.]—Friends and classmates! We have passed through the dread ordeal of another examination. Our grave and reverend seigniors have set in solemn inquisition over us, to their hearts’ content. They have weighed us, and gauged us, and tested us, and dissected and analyzed us, till we feel as if they had found out about all we know, besides some things that we don’t know. Our learned and venerable teacher, of whom we would ever speak with affection and esteem, has shown us in all our paces—trotting through our declamations and reading lessons, at a lively rate—tripping lightly among the big words in the dictionary—limping over verbs, and participles, and relatives, and copulatives—stumbling among cubes and roots, and the vulgarest of fractions—and floundering in a sea of forgotten geographical names and latitudes.
Boy.—I say, Johnny, there’s one of your paces he didn’t put you through to-day—that’s the pace you exhibited when he flogged you round the school-room and out of the window, the other day.
Several Boys.—Order! order! order!