edit was given in that
case to the pupil and too little to the teacher. The distance between
English words of one syllable and Greek tragedy is only a matter of
time: the distance between blank chaos and those one-syllabled words
might well have seemed eternal!

Not that Miss Jencks had quite such a task ahead of her. Caliban had
been trained into habits of relentless cleanliness, and an almost
mechanical regularity of routine work. It was his clumsy hands that
had arranged the flaming nasturtiums in the silver bowl under the
Henner etching, his rude pantomime that purchased the bi-weekly bone
for the mysteriously named Rosy, his weather wisdom that was sought
when it was a question of an extended sailing party. In fact, I am
inclined to think, in view of his subsequent progress, that some of
his ignorance was feigned, as is often the case in these instances of
arrested mental development. However that may have been, on the
occasion of this visit I found him marvellously improved, his hair
cut, his nondescript garments evolved into a modest sort of livery,
his vocabulary no longer a series of grunts, his very pantomime more
elastic. Margarita never changed her old methods of communication with
him, but the rest of us, at Miss Jencks's earnest entreaty, fatigued
ourselves amiably in order to elicit the guttural "yes" and "no" and
"do not know" she had so laboriously taught him.

Best of all, his disposition had altered to a very considerable
extent, and this improvement on his old surliness was of the greatest
assistance to us on the occasion I must now narrate.

It was I--strangely fated to discover so many of the links in this
wonderfully twined chain of Margarita's life--who stumbled by the
merest chance on the last one really needed to complete the story.
Zealous for the perfection of our Island, I selected a deep gully,
filled with heavy boughs and loose unsightly rocks, as the next point
for improvement, and bespoke the services of Caliban for the purpose.
Greatly to my surprise, for he was attached to me, and always showed
pleasure at rowing me over for my visits, he refused point blank to
help me and even tried, in a series of clumsy ruses, to start me at
work elsewhere. Vexed, but quite unsuspicious, I set to work by myself
at pulling off the upper boughs, trusting to shame him into helping me
with the stones, which seemed to have been tossed there in a sort of
midden. When he found that I was persistent in m