of animals!
Some boy's definition of a horse. Bitzer, yours."

The square finger, moving here and there, lighted suddenly on Bitzer,
perhaps because he chanced to sit in the same ray of sunlight which,
darting in at one of the bare windows of the intensely whitewashed room,
irradiated Sissy. For the boys and girls sat on the face of the inclined
plane in two compact bodies, divided up the centre by a narrow interval;
and Sissy, being at the corner of a row on the sunny side, came in for
the beginning of a sunbeam, of which Bitzer, being at the corner of a
row on the other side, a few rows in advance, caught the end. But
whereas the girl was so dark-eyed and dark-haired that she seemed to
receive a deeper and more lustrous color from the sun when it shone upon
her, the boy was so light-eyed and light-haired that the selfsame rays
appeared to draw out of him what little color he ever possessed. His
cold eyes would hardly have been eyes, but for the short ends of lashes
which, by bringing them into immediate contrast with something paler
than themselves, expressed their form. His short-cropped hair might have
been a mere continuation of the sandy freckles on his forehead and face.
His skin was so unwholesomely deficient in the natural tinge, that he
looked as though if he were cut he would bleed white.

"Bitzer," said Thomas Gradgrind. "Your definition of a horse."

"Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth; namely, twenty-four grinders,
four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy
countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with
iron. Age known by marks in mouth." Thus (and much more) Bitzer.

"Now, girl number twenty," said Mr. Gradgrind, "you know what a horse
is."

She courtesied again, and would have blushed deeper, if she could have
blushed deeper than she had blushed all this time. Bitzer, after rapidly
blinking at Thomas Gradgrind with both eyes at once, and so catching the
light upon his quivering ends of lashes that they looked like the
antennae of busy insects, put his knuckles to his freckled forehead, and
sat down again.

The third gentleman now stepped forth. A mighty man at cutting and
drying, he was; a government officer; in his way (and in most other
people's too), a professed pugilist; always in training, always with a
system to force down the general throat like a bolus, always to be heard
of at the bar of his little Public-office, ready to fight all E