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"Troth, sir, I am afeared many a time you were ornamented with the dunce's cap in your school-days, and well, I'll be bound, you became it. Don't I say the answer's before you, there?" "There is nothing here, you scoundrel, but a deal box." "Eight, sir; and a deal of intelligence can it give you, if you have the sense to find it out. Now, listen, sir.
And, breathing into his nostrils the breath of life, he became a living soul! Here is the "bridge" over which the "evolutionist" may pass, if he will, without wearing either the dunce's cap or the ass's ears. It spans the chasm between the anthropoid ape and man as no other bridge can span it.
Halting, accidentally in a row, before this spot they looked at it with interest. Suddenly the Professor stepped in front of the others, and, pointing to the knoll, said, with twinkling eyes "What does it suggest? "I know, sir!" exclaimed the Captain, who stood at the dunce's extremity of the line, holding out his fist with true schoolboy eagerness.
The Sultan, after some conversation, turned to Badger, who, poor man, not being conversant with the patois, could only stand still in the dunce's cap which Burton, as it were, had clapped on him and look extremely foolish; while the bystanders nodded to each other and said, "Look at that fellow. He can't say two words. He's a fraud."
Displayed on hooks upon the wall in all their terrors, were the cane and ruler; and near them, on a small shelf of its own, the dunce's cap, made of old newspapers and decorated with glaring wafers of the largest size.
Larry, decorated with a dunce's cap, placed upon his yellow head by a jovial matron, found himself fated, by a final effort of penalising fancy on the part of another matron, to select "a young lady," to conduct her to the topmost step of the staircase, and there, on his knees, to kiss either her shoe-buckle or her lips; "whichever he likes best!" decreed the matron, archly.
After lunch he shamefacedly borrowed the dunce's punt. The necessities of punting, which kept him far from her, and demanded much adroit labour, gradually restored his self-respect, and he was able to look the uncelebrated oarsmen they met in the eyes, except when they were accompanied by their parents and sisters, which subtly made him feel uncomfortable again.
"Now whose picture have I drawn?" he demanded loudly. "Well, you tried to draw mine," responded the professor, dropping into normal English, "but as the dunce's tie is far up the back of his collar, I leave the audience to decide whose it is."
"Dunder and blitzen!" swore Peter Alrichs, "hast thou lost all our provision and made fools of us, too?" They struck the dunce's cap off Nanking's head with their staves, and threw their beer in his face. "Two hundred guilders are we out of pocket," cried both these great men. "Was ever such a brainless dolt in our possessions?"
I was somewhat disappointed in finding that the edition of the "English Poets" for which he was to write prefaces and lives was not an undertaking directed by him, but that he was to furnish a preface and life to any poet the booksellers pleased. I asked him if he would do this to any dunce's works if they should ask him. Johnson: "Yes, sir, and say he was a dunce."
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