"don't give way, you know;
don't be beat."

"I can't make it out at all," said Sam, sobbing. "I've got such a
buzzing in my head with it! And if I can't do it I must stop; because I
can't go on to the next till I understand this. Oh, dear me!"

"Lay your head there a little, my boy, till it gets clearer; then
perhaps you will be able to make it out. You may depend on it that you
ought to learn it, or the good Doctor wouldn't have set it to you:
never let a thing beat you, my son."

So Sam cried on his father's shoulder a little, and then went in with
his book; and not long after, the Doctor looked in unperceived, and saw
the boy with his elbows on the table and the book before him. Even
while he looked a big tear fell plump into the middle of A H; so the
Doctor came quietly in and said,--

"Can't you manage it, Sam?"

Sam shook his head.

"Just give me hold of the book; will you, Sam?"

Sam complied without word or comment; the Doctor sent it flying through
the open window, halfway down the garden. "There!" said he, nodding his
head, "that's the fit place for him this day: you've had enough of him
at present; go and tell one of the blacks to dig some worms, and we'll
make holiday and go a fishing."

Sam looked at the Doctor, and then through the window at his old enemy
lying in the middle of the flowerbed. He did not like to see the poor
book, so lately his master, crumpled and helpless, fallen from its high
estate so suddenly. He would have gone to its assistance, and picked it
up and smoothed it, the more so as he felt that he had been beaten.

The Doctor seemed to see everything. "Let it lie here, my child," he
said; "you are not in a position to assist a fallen enemy; you are
still the vanquished party. Go and get the worms."

He went, and when he came back he found the Doctor sitting beside his
father in the verandah, with a penknife in one hand and the ace of
spades in the other. He cut the card into squares, triangles, and
parallelograms, while Sam looked on, and, demonstrating as he went,
fitted them one into the other, till the boy saw his bugbear of a
proposition made as clear as day before his eyes.

"Why," said Sam, "that's all as clear as need be. I understand it. Now
may I pick the book up, Doctor?"

History was the pleasantest part of all Sam's tasks, for they would sit
in the little room given up for a study, with the French windows open
looking on the flower-garden, Sam reading aloud and