“I didn’t get them,” Mrs. Forester had answered. “Miss Green had them. She brought them with her. I believe I bought them from her: she told me most of them were difficult to obtain now.”
“I should think they would be. Poor little kid—just fancy having to wade through these! Why, they’re fit for boys of fifteen, if they’re fit for anything at all—only they’re not! Every one ought to be scrapped. Look at the tiny print, and the weary, long paragraphs. And to drag a little nine-year-old through them!”
“I do feel rather ashamed,” Mrs. Forester had admitted, after an examination of Miss Green’s ancient literature. “They are really dreadful, aren’t they? She came with high recommendations, and I thought it wouldn’t matter if she were a bit old-fashioned—I was so much away from home that it seemed better not to have a very young governess to leave in charge of Rex.”
“And didn’t he tell you he hated his lessons?”
“Well, he did. But then so had you and Wilfred and Arthur before him,” Mrs. Forester had said, twinkling. Helen had laughed.
“I suppose poor old Rex has paid the penalty of our grumbles—although I know the other boys and I never had books like that. Well, you’ll let me send up all the things he ought to have, won’t you, Mother?”—and Mrs. Forester had thankfully consented.
So Rex found his new lessons taken from books that were easy to read and pleasant to look at and to handle—books that made history a succession of fascinating stories, and Geography something more than a weary catalogue of place-names and products; and there was something new called Literature, so like story-telling that it seemed impossible that it should be really a lesson. He found new peep-holes into learning that were extraordinarily interesting. Punctuation, under Miss Green, had meant a collection of horrible things called “stops,” traps to catch the unwary, for which there was neither rhyme nor reason. With the twins, they became kind little bridges over which you stepped into understanding just how a sentence should go: some places required big bridges, like a full-stop, or lesser bridges, like a semi-colon, and others only tiny foot-bridges, which were commas: but always when you crossed them, the sense of what you read was waiting meekly for you, instead of being a will-o’-the-wisp thing that dodged away from you and hid itself in the mazes of a paragraph. Once you had mastered them it was impossible to read poetry badly, and the lines sang to you as they were meant to sing. Maps, with Miss Green, had been the dreariest species of jigsaw puzzles; now they became pictures that helped you to make stories wonderfully alive. When you had a twin reading you the story of how Hawke chased the French fleet into Quiberon Bay, the full thrill of the story came home if you followed his course on the map, tracing his rush through the quicksands and shallows and roaring breakers, his only pilot-light the flash of the enemy guns. “It would seem just any old bay, if you didn’t see it,” Rex said. “But when the map makes you understand what an awful passage it was—and he did it at night, and in a howling gale!—well, it just makes you squiggle down the back!”