ry eye was looking at us strangers as a
dog looks at his game, or when seeking it; they knew everything we had
on, everything that could be known through their senses. I never felt
myself so studied and scrutinized before. If any one could have examined
them upon what they thus mastered, Sir Charles Trevelyan and John Mill
would have come away astonished, and, I trust, humble. Well then, the
work of the day began; the mill was set a-going, and what a change! In
an instant their eyes were like the windows of a house with the blinds
down; no one was looking out; everything blank; their very features
changed--their jaws fell, their cheeks flattened, they drooped and
looked ill at ease--stupid, drowsy, sulky--and getting them to speak, or
think, or in any way to energize, was like trying to get any one to come
to the window at three of a summer morning, when, if they do come, they
are half awake, rubbing their eyes and growling. So with my little
Celts. They were like an idle and half asleep collie by the fireside, as
contrasted with the collie on the hill and in the joy of work; the form
of dog and boy are there--he, the self of each, was elsewhere (for I
differ from Professor Ferrier in thinking that the dog _has_ the reflex
ego, and is a very knowing being.) I noticed that anything they really
knew roused them somewhat; what they had merely to transmit or pass
along, as if they were a tube through which the master blew the pea of
knowledge into our faces, was performed as stolidly as if they were
nothing but a tube.

At last the teacher asked where Sheffield was, and was answered; it was
then pointed to by the dux, as a dot on a skeleton map. And now came a
flourish. "What is Sheffield famous for?" Blank stupor, hopeless
vacuity, till he came to a sort of sprouting Dougal Cratur--almost as
wee, and as glegg, and as tousy about the head, as my own Kintail
terrier, whom I saw at that moment through the open door careering after
a hopeless rabbit, with much benefit to his muscles and his wind--who
was trembling with keenness. He shouted out something which was liker
"cutlery" than anything else, and was received as such amid our
rapturous applause. I then ventured to ask the master to ask small and
red Dougal what cutlery was; but from the sudden erubescence of his
pallid, ill-fed cheek, and the alarming brightness of his eyes, I
twigged at once that _he_ didn't himself know what it meant. So I put
the question myself, and