His pathos was most comical.  It was a good month before he could see pudding taken away from table without a sigh of regret that he could not finish it as deputy for the Devonport household.  The pranks of the little fellow, and his revel in a country life, and muddy wildness in it, amused Laetitia from morning to night.  She, when she had caught him, taught him in the morning; Vernon, favoured by the chase, in the afternoon.  Young Crossjay would have enlivened any household.  He was not only indolent, he was opposed to the acquisition of knowledge through the medium of books, and would say:  “But I don’t want to!” in a tone to make a logician thoughtful.  Nature was very strong in him.  He had, on each return of the hour for instruction, to be plucked out of the earth, rank of the soil, like a root, for the exercise of his big round headpiece on those tyrannous puzzles.  But the habits of birds, and the place for their eggs, and the management of rabbits, and the tickling of fish, and poaching joys with combative boys of the district, and how to wheedle a cook for a luncheon for a whole day in the rain, he soon knew of his great nature.  His passion for our naval service was a means of screwing his attention to lessons after he had begun to understand that the desert had to be traversed to attain midshipman’s rank.  He boasted ardently of his fighting father, and, chancing to be near the Hall as he was talking to Vernon and Laetitia of his father, he propounded a question close to his heart, and he put it in these words, following:  “My father’s the one to lead an army!” when he paused.  “I say, Mr. Whitford, Sir Willoughby’s kind to me, and gives me crown-pieces, why wouldn’t he see my father, and my father came here ten miles in the rain to see him, and had to walk ten miles back, and sleep at an inn?”

The only answer to be given was, that Sir Willoughby could not have been at home.  “Oh! my father saw him, and Sir Willoughby said he was not at home,” the boy replied, producing an odd ring in the ear by his repetition of “not at home” in the same voice as the apology, plainly innocent of malice.  Vernon told Laetitia, however, that the boy never asked an explanation of Sir Willoughby.

Unlike the horse of the adage, it was easier to compel young Crossjay to drink of the waters of instruction than to get him to the brink.  His heart was not so antagonistic as his nature, and by degrees, owing to a proper mixture of discipline and cajolery, he imbibed.  He was whistling at the cook’s windows after a day of wicked truancy, on an April night, and reported adventures over the supper supplied to him.  Laetitia entered the kitchen with a reproving forefinger.  He jumped to kiss her, and went on chattering of a place fifteen miles distant, where he had seen Sir Willoughby riding with a young lady.  The impossibility that the boy should have got so far on foot made Laetitia doubtful of his veracity, until she heard that a gentleman had taken him up on