should say "no"), and then to ask her leave to take the Penny
Numbers down to the farm and sit with Cripple Charlie.

Now and then she would go too, and chat with Mrs. Wood, whilst the
school-master and I were turning the terrestrial globe by Charlie's
sofa; but as a rule Charlie and I were alone, and the Woods went round
the homestead together, and came home hand in hand, through the garden,
and we laughed to think how we had taken him for a tramp.

And sometimes on a summer's evening, when we talked and read aloud to
each other across a quaint oak table that had been the miser's, of
far-away lands and strange birds of gorgeous plumage, the school-master
sat silent in the arm-chair by the open lattice, resting his white head
against the mullion that the ivy was creeping up, and listened to the
blackbirds and thrushes as their songs dropped by odd notes into
silence, and gazed at the near fields and trees, and the little
homestead with its hayricks on the hill, when the grass was apple-green
in the gold mist of sunset: and went on gazing when that had faded into
fog, and the hedgerow elms were black against the sky, as if the eye
could not be filled with seeing, nor the ear with hearing!

CHAPTER VI.

"Who, doomed to go in company with Pain,
Turns his necessity to glorious gain."
WORDSWORTH.

"Jack," said Charlie, "listen!"

He was reading bits out of the numbers to me, whilst I was rigging a
miniature yacht to sail on the dam; and Mrs. Wood's husband was making a
plan of something at another table, and occasionally giving me advice
about my masts and sails. "It's about the South American forests," said
Charlie. "'There every tree has a character of its own; each has its
peculiar foliage, and probably also a tint unlike that of the trees
which surround it. Gigantic vegetables of the most different families
intermix their branches; five-leaved bignonias grow by the side of
bonduc-trees; cassias shed their yellow blossoms upon the rich fronds of
arborescent ferns; myrtles and eugenias, with their thousand arms,
contrast with the elegant simplicity of palms; and among the airy
foliage of the mimosa the ceropia elevates its giant leaves and heavy
candelabra-shaped branches. Of some trees the trunk is perfectly smooth,
of others it is defended by enormous spines, and the whole are often
apparently sustained by the slanting stems of a huge wild fig-tree. With