ee's big fat head.
I say, won't it do him good and make him civil? Look here," he
continued, making a bound and pointing to a knot on the rough floor
boards, "that's the exact spot where his head came down whop."

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE.

We boys used to think the days at old Browne's very long and tedious,
and often enough feel a mortal hatred of Euclid as a tyrant who had
invented geometry for the sake of driving boys mad. What distaste, too,
we had for all the old Romans who had bequeathed their language to us;
just as if English wasn't ten times better, Mercer used to say.

"Bother their old declensions and conjugations!" he would cry. "What's
the good of them all? I call it a stupid language to have no proper
prepositions and articles and the rest of it: tucking i's, a's, and e's
at the end of words instead."

But what days they were after all--days that never more return! The
Doctor was pretty stern at times, and gave us little rest. Mr Rebble
seemed to be always lying in wait to puzzle us with questions, and Mr
Hasnip appeared to think that we never had enough to learn; while the
German and French masters, who came over twice a week from Hastings,
both seemed to have been born with the idea that there was nothing of
the slightest consequence in the way of our studies but the tongues they
taught. And oh, the scoldings we received for what they called our
neglect and stupidity!

"_Ach, dumkopf_!" the German master would cry wrathfully; while the
French master had a way of screwing up his eyes, wrinkling his face, and
grinding his teeth at our pronunciation.

I'm afraid we hated them all, in complete ignorance of the other side of
the case, and the constant unwearying application they gave to a set of
reckless young rascals, who construed Latin with their lips and the game
that was to be played that afternoon with their brains.

I confess it. I must have been very stupid in some things, sharp as I
was in others, and I have often thought since that Mr Rebble's
irritability was due to the constant trouble we gave him; that Mr
Hasnip was at heart a thorough gentleman; and as for "Old Browne," as we
called him, he was a ripe scholar and a genuine loveable old Englishman,
with the health and welfare of his boys thoroughly at heart.

We thought nothing of it. A boy's nature does not grasp all these
things. To us it was a matter of course that, if we were ill, Mrs
Doctor should have us shut up in another