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That night he cried himself to sleep thinking over his dire misfortune. At school when he read he closed one eye, and this made the children laugh. So much did their taunts prey upon him that he ran away from school to escape their gibes. One of the Friars Gray caught him; whipped him before the whole school; put a dunce-cap on his head, and stood him on a high chair.
You are not stupid! You and I will fight it out together! Will you trust me, Jimmy?" He sobbed, but she could perceive that he was listening. Had her hope become his? Surely they were words he had never heard before. "Jimmy, listen to me. I have found out something, and all owing to that ridiculous dunce-cap. It is I who have been stupid.
But Paddy Byrne did not love art for art's sake, so he applied the ferule vigorously to little Goldsmith's anatomy, with a hope of diverting the lad's inclinations from art to arithmetic. I do not think the plan was very successful, for the pockmarked youngster was often adorned with the dunce-cap. "And, Sir," said Doctor Johnson, many years after, "it must have been very becoming."
"Come here, Larry McQueen, and bring your slate," he said. "Sure, I'll teach you better manners. Get up on this stool now, and show yourself." He put a large paper dunce-cap on Larry's head, and made him sit up on a stool before the whole school! The other children laughed, all but Eileen. She hid her face on her desk, and two little tears squeezed out between her fingers. But Larry didn't cry.
To a great degree he replaced the ferule, cat-o'-nine-tails, dunce-cap, musty, dusty books, tear-stained slates, awful examples and punishments of a hundred lines of Vergil, by wholesome good-cheer and limpid forgetfulness of self in drawing pictures of spiders and noting the difference between a wasp and a bee, a butterfly and a moth, a frog and a toad, a mushroom and a toadstool.
"You ain't going to let up until somebody whispers T.B. in your shell-pink ear; and maybe them two letters will bring you to your senses." "Yes, T.B." "Who's he?" "Gee! you're as smart as a fish on a hook! You oughtta bought a velvet dunce-cap with your lunch money instead of that brown poke-bonnet. T.B. was what I said T.B." "Honest, Hat, I dun'no' " "For Heaven's sake!
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