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There are fathers and mothers who know all their sons' companions by name. There are girls from the neighboring schoolhouse, and scholars in the gymnasium, who come to wait for their brothers. There is one old gentleman who was a colonel formerly, and who, when a boy drops a copy-book or a pen, picks it up for him.
It backed up a stout old lady HOGARTH drew her exact likeness more than once and a boy who was carefully writing a copy in a copy-book. 'Well, ma'am, how do YOU do? Sweetly, she can assure the dear gentlemen, sweetly. Charmingly, charmingly. And overjoyed to see us! 'Why, this is a strange time for this boy to be writing his copy. In the middle of the night!
"Hush!" he said; then, in a low voice, catching me by the arm, "don't you know that Crossi spoke to me day before yesterday of having caught a glimpse; of an inkstand in the hands of his father, who has returned from America; a conical inkstand, made by hand, with a copy-book and a pen, that is the one; six years!
Who does not know the small, slanted, Italian hand of these girls'-compositions, their stringing together of the good old traditional copy-book phrases, their occasional gushes of sentiment, the profound estimates of the world, sounding to the old folks that read them as the experience of a bantam-pullet's last-hatched young one with the chips of its shell on its head would sound to a Mother Cary's chicken, who knew the great ocean with all its typhoons and tornadoes?
He looked at one and at the other, with a strange fixed stare as he wrote, not keeping his eyes on the paper, as Lenny had been taught to do when he sat down to his copy-book.
To keep them in my memory was the most difficult task, as it was quite contrary to the prison rules to write one's own compositions in a copy-book. If John Bunyan had been unfortunate enough to get into one of our model prisons, the "Pilgrim's Progress" would have been unwritten.
"I never thought of that way," said Sam, watching him with much inward chagrin at his own failure. "I should think you'd written 'Look before you leap, in your copy-book often enough to get the idea into your stupid head. Come, crook," commanded Ben, leaning forward with extended little finger.
Dictation exercises were turned to account in the study of grammar and orthography, and writing was taught by imitation, though the "copy-book" was not paper, but a tablet covered with a thin coating of wax, and the pen a stylus, pencil-shaped, sharp at one end and flat at the other, so that the mark made by the point might be smoothed out by reversing the instrument.
When left thus, I used to spend the time in writing in the spaces left in Master Thomas's copy-book, copying what he had written. I continued to do this until I could write a hand very similar to that of Master Thomas. Thus, after a long, tedious effort for years, I finally succeeded in learning how to write.
Who does not know the small, slanted, Italian hand of these girls'-compositions, their stringing together of the good old traditional copy-book phrases; their occasional gushes of sentiment, their profound estimates of the world, sounding to the old folks that read them as the experience of a bantam pullet's last-hatched young one with the chips of its shell on its head would sound to a Mother Cary's chicken, who knew the great ocean with all its typhoons and tornadoes?
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