“That’s the way,—­that ’s the way!” exclaimed he.  “It’s just the same thing as my plan for teaching drawing.”

Some curiosity was shown among The Teacups to know what the queer creature had got into his mind, and Number Five asked him, in her irresistible tones, if he wouldn’t oblige us by telling us all about it.

He looked at her a moment without speaking.  I suppose he has often been made fun of,—­slighted in conversation, taken as a butt for people who thought themselves witty, made to feel as we may suppose a cracked piece of china-ware feels when it is clinked in the company of sound bits of porcelain.  I never saw him when he was carelessly dealt with in conversation,—­for it would sometimes happen, even at our table,—­without recalling some lines of Emerson which always struck me as of wonderful force and almost terrible truthfulness:—­

     “Alas! that one is born in blight,
     Victim of perpetual slight
     When thou lookest in his face
     Thy heart saith, ’Brother, go thy ways
     None shall ask thee what thou doest,
     Or care a rush for what thou knowest,
     Or listen when thou repliest,
     Or remember where thou liest,
     Or how thy supper is sodden;’
     And another is born
     To make the sun forgotten.”

Poor fellow!  Number Seven has to bear a good deal in the way of neglect and ridicule, I do not doubt.  Happily, he is protected by an amount of belief in himself which shields him from many assailants who would torture a more sensitive nature.  But the sweet voice of Number Five and her sincere way of addressing him seemed to touch his feelings.  That was the meaning of his momentary silence, in which I saw that his eyes glistened and a faint flush rose on his cheeks.  In a moment, however, as soon as he was on his hobby, he was all right, and explained his new and ingenious system as follows: 

“A man at a certain distance appears as a dark spot,—­nothing more.  Good.  Anybody, man, woman, or child, can make a dot, say a period, such as we use in writing.  Lesson No. 1.  Make a dot; that is, draw your man, a mile off, if that is far enough.  Now make him come a little nearer, a few rods, say.  The dot is an oblong figure now.  Good.  Let your scholar draw the oblong figure.  It is as easy as it is to make a note of admiration.  Your man comes nearer, and now some hint of a bulbous enlargement at one end, and perhaps of lateral appendages and a bifurcation, begins to show itself.  The pupil sets down with his pencil just what he sees,—­no more.  So by degrees the man who serves as model approaches.  A bright pupil will learn to get the outline of a human figure in ten lessons, the model coming five hundred feet nearer each time.  A dull one may require fifty, the model beginning a mile off, or more, and coming a hundred feet nearer at each move.”