Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Don-a-dreams.djvu/16

 was the eldest of a brood of three, his mother had become an invalid, and he had been neglected in his most inquisitive years for the sicklier infants who had succeeded him. The little nursemaid, Nannie, had taught him to read in an "indestructible" copy of "Jack, the Giant-Killer and what he had not been able to learn of the world from a volume of Grimm's "Fairy Tales" he had worked out according to his fancy.

When Miss Morris, a visiting governess, succeeded Nannie as his teacher, two small desks were set up for him and Frankie in the playroom, and he began eagerly to learn the game of figures which she called "Arithmetic." But she objected to his methods when she found that 1 was a tall, thin man, and 2 a little old woman bent double, and 3 a fat cook with an apron-string waist, and 4 a boy sitting. There followed explanations of things in general, and Miss Morris spent a morning asking questions and laughing at the answers she got. She set herself, with patience, to correct his mistaken fancies; and he bore it as a child must. But when she said that all fairy tales were untruths and denied Jack and his Giant any existence in reality, he began to doubt her; and after she had gone, he turned to the book itself, and found her word outweighed by the strong authority of the print and the pictures.

He said nothing; he had, already, the habit of silence. But, thereafter, when she taught him that "the world was round like an orange and flattened at the poles," he looked out of the playroom window and saw a level earth that stretched away from the