red
and forty other schoolmasters had been lately turned at the same time,
in the same factory, on the same principles, like so many pianoforte
legs. He had been put through an immense variety of paces, and had
answered volumes of head-breaking questions. Orthography, etymology,
syntax, and prosody, biography, astronomy, geography, and general
cosmography, the sciences of compound proportion, algebra,
land-surveying and leveling, vocal music, and drawing from models, were
all at the ends of his ten chilled fingers. He had worked his stony way
into her Majesty's most Honorable Privy Council's Schedule B, and had
taken the bloom off the higher branches of mathematics and physical
science, French, German, Latin, and Greek. He knew all about all the
Water Sheds of all the world (whatever they are), and all the histories
of all the peoples, and all the names of all the rivers and mountains,
and all the productions, manners, and customs of all the countries, and
all their boundaries and bearings on the two-and-thirty points of the
compass. Ah, rather overdone, M'Choakumchild. If he had only learned a
little less, how infinitely better he might have taught much more!

He went to work in this preparatory lesson not unlike Morgiana in the
'Forty Thieves': looking into all the vessels ranged before him, one
after another, to see what they contained. Say, good M'Choakumchild.
When from thy boiling store thou shalt fill each jar brim-full,
by-and-by, dost thou think that then wilt always kill outright the
robber Fancy lurking within--or sometimes only maim him and distort him!

THE BOY AT MUGBY

From 'Mugby Junction'

I am the boy at Mugby. That's about what _I_ am.

You don't know what I mean? What a pity! But I think you do. I think you
must. Look here. I am the Boy at what is called The Refreshment Room at
Mugby Junction, and what's proudest boast is, that it never yet
refreshed a mortal being.

Up in a corner of the Down Refreshment Room at Mugby Junction, in the
height of twenty-seven cross draughts (I've often counted 'em while they
brush the First Class hair twenty-seven ways), behind the bottles, among
the glasses, bounded on the nor'west by the beer, stood pretty far to
the right of a metallic object that's at times the tea-urn and at times
the soup-tureen, according to the nature of the last twang imparted to
its contents, which are the same groundwork, fended off from the
traveler by a barrier of stale spo