Jock looked up at her with wondering eyes; for his own part he had no enthusiasm for study, nor, except for the pleasure of being with the circus boy, whom he vaguely apprehended as caracoling about the very vague place which his imagination conceived of as “School,” on his pretty pony, had he any desire to be sent there; but it did not occur to him to enter into any controversy on the subject.
“Are you going up-town, Lucy?” he asked; “have you got to go to shops _again_? I wish you would buy all your ribbons at one time, and not be always, always buying more. Aunty Ford when she goes out goes to shops too, and you have to stand and stare about, and there’s nothing to look at, and nothing to do.”
“Oh, I don’t know--nothing,” said the boy; “if I had a pony I’d get on its back and ride off a hundred miles before I stopped.”
“The horse couldn’t go a hundred miles, nor you either, dear.”
“Oh, yes, I could, or ten at least, and if I met any one on the road I’d run races with him; and I’d call the horse Black Bess, or else Rozinante, or else Chiron; but Chiron wasn’t only a horse, you know, he was a horseman.”
“Well, dear,” said Lucy, calmly, “I wish you were a horseman, too, if you would like it so very much.”
“You don’t understand,” cried the child, “you don’t understand! I couldn’t be like Chiron; he had four legs, he was a man-horse. He brought up a little boy once, lots of little boys, and taught them. I say, Lucy, if Chiron was living now I should like to go to school to him.”
“You are a silly little boy,” said Lucy. “Who ever heard of a school-master that had four legs? I wonder papa lets you read so many silly books.”
“They are not silly books at all; it is only because you don’t know,” said Jock, reddening. “Suppose we were cast on a desert island, what would _you_ do? You don’t know any stories to tell round the fire; but I know heaps of stories, I know more stories than any one. Aunty Ford is pretty good,” the little fellow went on, reflectively: “_she_ knows some; and she likes me to tell her out of Shakespeare, and about the ‘Three Calenders’ and the ‘Genii in the Bottle,’ and that improves her mind; but if you were in a desert island what _should_ you do? You don’t know one story to tell.”