back and finish grammar school, and then go through to high school and
university."

"But that takes money," he interrupted.

"Oh!" she cried. "I had not thought of that. But then you have
relatives, somebody who could assist you?"

He shook his head.

"My father and mother are dead. I've two sisters, one married, an' the
other'll get married soon, I suppose. Then I've a string of
brothers,--I'm the youngest,--but they never helped nobody. They've just
knocked around over the world, lookin' out for number one. The oldest
died in India. Two are in South Africa now, an' another's on a whaling
voyage, an' one's travellin' with a circus--he does trapeze work. An' I
guess I'm just like them. I've taken care of myself since I was
eleven--that's when my mother died. I've got to study by myself, I
guess, an' what I want to know is where to begin."

"I should say the first thing of all would be to get a grammar. Your
grammar is--" She had intended saying "awful," but she amended it to "is
not particularly good."

He flushed and sweated.

"I know I must talk a lot of slang an' words you don't understand. But
then they're the only words I know--how to speak. I've got other words
in my mind, picked 'em up from books, but I can't pronounce 'em, so I
don't use 'em."

"It isn't what you say, so much as how you say it. You don't mind my
being frank, do you? I don't want to hurt you."

"No, no," he cried, while he secretly blessed her for her kindness. "Fire
away. I've got to know, an' I'd sooner know from you than anybody else."

"Well, then, you say, 'You was'; it should be, 'You were.' You say 'I
seen' for 'I saw.' You use the double negative--"

"What's the double negative?" he demanded; then added humbly, "You see, I
don't even understand your explanations."

"I'm afraid I didn't explain that," she smiled. "A double negative
is--let me see--well, you say, 'never helped nobody.' 'Never' is a
negative. 'Nobody' is another negative. It is a rule that two negatives
make a positive. 'Never helped nobody' means that, not helping nobody,
they must have helped somebody."

"That's pretty clear," he said. "I never thought of it before. But it
don't mean they _must_ have helped somebody, does it? Seems to me that
'never helped nobody' just naturally fails to say whether or not they
helped somebody. I never thought of it before, and I'll never say it
again."

She was pleased and surprised with the