I'll send no man away because
he's stupid: if Billy Taft, the idiot, wanted to learn anything, I'd not
refuse to teach him. But I'll not throw away good knowledge on people
who think they can get it by the sixpenn'orth, and carry it away with
'em as they would an ounce of snuff. So never come to me again, if you
can't show that you've been working with your own heads, instead of
thinking that you can pay for mine to work for you. That's the last word
I've got to say to you."
With this final sentence, Bartle Massey gave a sharper rap than ever
with his knobbed stick, and the discomfited lads got up to go with a
sulky look. The other pupils had happily only their writing-books to
show, in various stages of progress from pot-hooks to round text; and
mere pen-strokes, however perverse, were less exasperating to Bartle
than false arithmetic. He was a little more severe than usual on Jacob
Storey's Z's, of which poor Jacob had written a pageful, all with their
tops turned the wrong way, with a puzzled sense that they were not right
"somehow." But he observed in apology, that it was a letter you never
wanted hardly, and he thought it had only been there "to finish off th'
alphabet, like, though ampusand (&) would ha' done as well, for what he
could see.
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