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But when a man let us say an Englishman of sixty full of worldly wisdom, having travelled much and seen many men and cities, looks on a young man, just out of the university, perhaps, very keen on his profession, very certain of making his way in the world, with a hundred interests in what seem to the other "new-fangled" things telephones and typewriters and bicycles and radio-activity and motor cars, things unknown to the old man's youth, talking of philosophies and theories and principles which were not taught at college when the other was an undergraduate, the elder is likely to think that the young man's judgment is sadly crude and raw, that his education has been altogether too diffused and made up of smatterings of too many things, and to say to himself that the old sound, simple ways were better.
With her rude common sense, as far removed from the snobbishness of the very Parisian servants as from the crass stupidity of the very provincial girls, who only admire what they do not understand, she had a respectful contempt for their dabbling in music, their pointless chatter, and all those perfectly useless and tiresome intellectual smatterings which play so large a part in such hypocritical existences.
Many teachers, school-committees, and parents wish to add a taste of Mechanics to the smatterings of twenty or thirty different subjects which constitute "liberal education," as understood in American high schools and colleges.
I have sometimes doubted whether an obscure farmer's daughter is any happier with her piano, and her piles of cheaply illustrated literature and translations of French novels, and her smatterings of science learned in normal schools, since she has learned too often to despise her father and mother and brother, and her uneducated rural beau, and all her surroundings, with poverty and unrest and aspiration for society eating out her soul.
It is really touching to see how free and happy he is, how the little fellow takes the whole wide world for his home, and all mankind for his family. He talks Spanish, at least that is his native tongue; but he is also very intelligible in English, and perhaps he likewise has smatterings of the speech of other countries, whither the winds may have wafted this little sea-bird.
When you go away in the summer, you should take up geology, or botany, or whatever suits the place you go to." "But I shall only have smatterings of things at this rate!" "Smatterings are very good things in their way, so long as you are not misled into thinking them more than they are!
As for the Crees well, he had been at Lone Moose less than forty-eight hours and he was wondering if the Board of Home Missions always shot as blindly at a distant mark. It would take him a year to learn the first smatterings of their tongue. A year! He had understood that the Lone Moose Crees were partly under civilized influences.
It may not seem so very much afterwards as the boy said of the tooth when he looked at it in the dentist's forceps but the wrench is really bad. I learned my letters from my mother, and picked up a few other smatterings before I had daily lessons from a tutor at Dingle.
And now my reader wishes to know what he saw and how it was that he was able to see it. As regards the second, my reader will readily understand that the secrets of magic are very carefully guarded, and any smatterings of it that I may ever have come by I possess, for what they are worth, subjects to oaths and penalties at which even bad men shudder.
But he retained some smatterings of it in mature life; and was rather fond of producing his classical scraps, often in an altogether mouldy, and indeed hitherto inexplicable condition.
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