Cressy

He put his pen between his teeth, raised himself slowly on his legs, and shading his eyes with his hand from the severe perspective of six feet, gazed admiringly down upon his work. Rupert, with his hands in his pockets and his back to the window, cynically assisted at the inspection.

“Wot’s that sick worm at the bottom of the page?” he asked.

“Wot might you think it wos?” said Uncle Ben beamingly.

“Looks like one o’ them snake roots you dig up with a little mud stuck to it,” returned Rupert critically.

“That’s my name.”

They both stood looking at it with their heads very much on one side. “It ain’t so bad as the rest you’ve done. It MIGHT be your name. That ez, it don’t look like anythin’ else,” suggested Rupert, struck with a new idea that it was perhaps more professional occasionally to encourage his pupil. “You might get on in course o’ time. But what are you doin’ all this for?” he asked suddenly.

“Doin’ what?”

“This yer comin’ to school when you ain’t sent, and you ain’t got no call to go—you, a grown-up man!”

The color deepened in Uncle Ben’s face to the back of his ears. “Wot would you giv’ to know, Roop? S’pose I reckoned some day to make a strike and sorter drop inter saciety easy—eh? S’pose I wanted to be ready to keep up my end with the other fellers, when the time kem? To be able to sling po’try and read novels and sich—eh?”

An expression of infinite and unutterable scorn dawned in the eyes of Rupert. “You do? Well,” he repeated with slow and cutting deliberation, “I’ll tell you what you’re comin’ here for, and the only thing that makes you come.”

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