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Updated: June 29, 2025
In the next field was a still odder sight; here grew gourd-like heads on erect reed-like stems, and engaged in plucking the ripe purple fruit, carefully distinguishing them from the scarlet unripened heads, were half-a-score of creatures which, from their occupation and demeanour, I took at first to be human; but which, as we approached nearer, I saw were only about half the size of my companion, and thickly covered with hair, with bushy tails, which they kept carefully erect so as not to touch the ground; creatures much resembling monkeys in movement, size, and length, and flexibility of limb, but in other respects more like gigantic squirrels.
"Wait, my dear fellow, with a little patience; you'll have lots of time before you for married troubles. What's the use of a man having half-a-score of children round him just when he is beginning to enjoy life? It is that that Miss Waddington thinks about; though, of course, she can't tell you so."
"Then," says William, "if I mistake not, your business is money; now, I desire to know, if you conquer and kill two or three thousand of these poor creatures, they have no money, pray what will you get? They are poor naked wretches; what shall you gain by them? But then," says William, "perhaps, in doing this, you may chance to lose half-a-score of your own company, as it is very probable you may.
Even the tenantry of the never-failing pigeon-house at the corner of the old garden were in turmoil, for half-a-score of their number had been transferred to the kitchen this morning to fill the goodly pasties which were to anticipate the blackberry tarts and sweet puddings, freezing in rich cream.
They found them, short, strong, and shivering, in the still open and undefended woods. In the springs before Chaucer, and earlier than the day of the first spring lyric, in the same places grew the keen wild flowers as now; but they assuredly were marked with another welcome; they made memories; this year's wild harvest was not confused with that of last year, or of half-a-score of years gone by.
He did not teach them directly how to gain them, but he supplied the inspiration. "Read much and well. Get the spirit. Learn the grammar, certainly. But read Latin till you can speak Latin, think Latin. It is more difficult to think Greek. Our stiff-necked, stubborn Lowland nature, produce of half-a-score of conquering nations, has not the right suppleness.
There was no need to use the light net which hung diagonally and unnecessarily across its owner's back, for the glittering little speckled trout was only about the size of a small dace, though it fought and kicked as hardily as if it had weighed a pound, and indulged in a series of active leaps as it was slipped through the hole in the lid of a creel, to drop into companionship with half-a-score of its fellows, which welcomed the new prisoner with a number of leaps almost as wild as its own.
He was counting on his fingers, and appeared to have lapsed into mental calculations. "I could get half-a-score or a dozen within a couple of hours. But a score " Again he paused, and again he fell to thinking. At last, more briskly: "Let us hear what pay you offer me, to thrust myself thus blindfolded into this business of yours as leader of the company you require?" he asked suddenly.
To put the thing more seriously, though perhaps not more truly, the human brain is not so constituted that you can ride or drive or "train" from school to school, examining as you go, for half-a-dozen or half-a-score hours a-day, or that you can devote the same time to the weariest and dreariest of all businesses, the reading of hundreds of all but identical answers to the same stock questions, and yet be fresh and fertile for imaginative composition.
These are the jewels of eloquence, and therefore the harder they are the more precious they must be. He'll take a scant piece of coarse sense and stretch it on the tenterhooks of half-a-score rhymes, until it crack that you may see through it and it rattle like a drumhead.
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