double-quick time.

The great and wise Newton once said of himself that, so far from knowing
all things, he seemed to himself to be but as a boy gathering pebbles on
the seashore, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before
him.

Newton was, in his way, almost as fine a fellow as Timothy Told-you-so,
and if Timothy would but stoop to have more of Newton's spirit, he might
in time come to possess an atom or two of Newton's sense.

CHAPTER TWELVE.

THE UNTIDY BOY.

Look at him! You could tell he was an untidy fellow at a single glance.
One of his bootlaces is hanging loose, and the band of his scarf has
slipped up above his collar. Though it is a fine day, his trouser legs
are splashed up to the knee; and as for a parting to his hair, you might
as well expect an Indian jungle to be combed. His hands are all over
ink, and the sticky marks about his mouth tell their own tale. In
short, Jack Sloven is a dirty boy, and is anything but a credit to the
school he belongs to.

I wish you could see his school books. The pages look like well-used
drum parchments, and I am certain Jack must often find it hard to
decipher the words upon them. His exercises look as if they had been
left out in an ink shower, and the very pen he uses is generally wet
with ink up to the very tip of the handle, which, by the way, he usually
nibbles when he's nothing better to do. Who shall describe his desk?
It is generally understood that a schoolboy's desk is the receptacle for
a moderately miscellaneous assortment of articles, but Jack's seemed
like a great pie, into which everything under the sun was crammed and
stored up. The lid never shut; but if you were to open it, its contents
would astonish you as much as the contents of that wonderful pie in the
nursery rhyme astonished the king when he lifted the crust.

There were books, papers, hooks, balls, worms, stale sandwiches,
photographs, toffee, birds' eggs, keys, money, knives, cherry stones,
silkworms, marbles, pencils, handkerchiefs, tarts, gum, sleeve links,
and walnut shells. Any one venturesome enough to take a header through
these might succeed in reaching the layer of last year's apple peel
below, or in penetrating to the crumb heaps in the bottom corners; but
few there were who possessed that amount of boldness. Of course, Jack
had no notion of what his worldly goods consisted. He had a way of
shying things into his desk and forgetting them; and only