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The rooks cawed in the glen, there was a hot hum of bees, and a company of starlings passed overhead, glittering in the sunlight like the scales of a herring. "They're taiching us a lesson," said Cæsar. "They're going together over the sea; but there's someones on earth would sooner go to heaven itself solitary, and take joy if they found themselves all alone and the cock of the walk there."
Her grammar was good enough for himself, and the exuberant caresses of her maudlin moods were even sometimes pleasant, but the boy must be degraded by neither. The woman did not reach to these high thoughts, but she was not slow to interpret the casual byplay in which they found expression. Her husband was taiching her son to dis-respeck her.
The great little man had one standing ground of daily assault on the dusty jacket of poor Pete, and that was that the lad came late to school. Every morning Pete's welcome from the tailor-schoolmaster was a volley of expletives, and a swipe of the cane across his shoulders. "The craythur! The dunce! The durt! I'm taiching him, and taiching him, and he won't be taicht."
"And is it taiching you to spell every word, Kitty?" he asked. "Every ordinary word," said Kate. "My gough!" said Pete, touching the book with awe. Next day he pored over the dictionary for an hour, but when he raised his face it wore a look of scepticism and scorn. "This spelling-book isn't taiching you nothing, darling," he said. "Isn't it. Pete?" "No, nothing," said Pete.
"Be quiet, will you?" and the little one was shaken back to her seat. "Aisy all, woman," said Pete. "She's just wanting her lil shoes and stockings off, that's it." Then talking to the child. "Um am-im lum la loo? Just so! I don't know what that means myself, but she does, you see. Aw, the child is taiching me heaps, sir. Listening to the lil one I'm remembering things.
"Look at that big one, now knotted like a blacksmith's muscles, but it'll go rotten as fast as the least lil one of the lot. It's taiching us a lesson, sir, that we all do fall big mountains as aisy as lil cocks. This world is changeable." Philip was not listening, but looking up at Kate, with a face of half-frightened tenderness.
Pete gave a prolonged whistle, then fell back in his chair, looked slowly up and said, "So you must first know how the word begins; is that it, Kitty?" "Why, yes," said Kate. "Then it's you that's taiching the spelling-book, darling; so we'll put it back on the shelf." For a fortnight Kate read and replied to Pete's correspondence. It was plentiful and various.
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