It made me mad with him. I was wrong in thinking Miss Janie not a pretty girl. Hers is that type of beauty that escapes attention by its own perfection. It is the eccentric, the discordant, that arrests the roving eye. To harmony one has to attune oneself.
“I believe,” said Miss Janie, as she drew away, wiping her cheek, “one could teach that donkey anything.”
Apparently she regarded willingness to kiss her as indication of exceptional amiability.
“Except to work,” commented her father. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” he said. “If you take that donkey off my hands and promise not to send it back again, why, you can have it.”
“For nothing,” insisted her father. “And if I have any argument, I’ll throw in the cart.”
Miss Janie sighed and shrugged her shoulders. It was arranged that Hopkins should deliver Nathaniel into my keeping some time the next day. Hopkins, it appeared, was the only person on the farm who could make the donkey go.
“I don’t know what it is,” said St. Leonard, “but he has a way with him.”
“And now,” I said, “there remains but Dick.”
“The lad I saw yesterday?” suggested St. Leonard. “Good-looking young fellow.”
“He is a nice boy,” I said. “I don’t really think I know a nicer boy than Dick; and clever, when you come to understand him. There is only one fault I have to find with Dick: I don’t seem able to get him to work.”
“I was thinking,” she answered, “how close the resemblance appears to be between him and Nathaniel.”
“The mistake,” said St. Leonard, “is with ourselves. We assume every boy to have the soul of a professor, and every girl a genius for music. We pack off our sons to cram themselves with Greek and Latin, and put our daughters down to strum at the piano. Nine times out of ten it is sheer waste of time. They sent me to Cambridge, and said I was lazy. I was not lazy. I was not intended by nature for a Senior Wrangler. I did not see the good of being a Senior Wrangler. Who wants a world of Senior Wranglers? Then why start every young man trying? I wanted to be a farmer. If intelligent lads were taught farming as a business, farming would pay. In the name of commonsense—”
“I am inclined to agree with you,” I interrupted him. “I would rather see Dick a good farmer than a third-rate barrister, anyhow. He thinks he could take an interest in farming. There are ten weeks before he need go back to Cambridge, sufficient time for the experiment. Will you take him as a pupil?”