Here at least was no common mind.  The reader will not be surprised to hear that the hour before breakfast extended into two hours after breakfast as well.  Nor did this take up too much of my time, for the lad was capable of doing a great deal for himself under the sense of help at hand.  His father, so far from making any objection to the arrangement, was delighted with it.  Nor do I believe that the lad did less work in the shop for it:  I learned that he worked regularly till eight o’clock every night.

Now the good of the arrangement was this:  I had the lad fresh in the morning, clear-headed, with no mists from the valley of labour to cloud the heights of understanding.  From the exercise of the mind it was a pleasant and relieving change to turn to bodily exertion.  I am certain that he both thought and worked better, because he both thought and worked.  Every literary man ought to be mechanical (to use a Shakespearean word) as well.  But it would have been quite a different matter, if he had come to me after the labour of the day.  He would not then have been able to think nearly so well.  But labour, sleep, thought, labour again, seems to me to be the right order with those who, earning their bread by the sweat of the brow, would yet remember that man shall not live by bread alone.  Were it possible that our mechanics could attend the institutions called by their name in the morning instead of the evening, perhaps we should not find them so ready to degenerate into places of mere amusement.  I am not objecting to the amusement; only to cease to educate in order to amuse is to degenerate.  Amusement is a good and sacred thing; but it is not on a par with education; and, indeed, if it does not in any way further the growth of the higher nature, it cannot be called good at all.

Having exercised him in the analysis of some of the best portions of our home literature,—­I mean helped him to take them to pieces, that, putting them together again, he might see what kind of things they were—­for who could understand a new machine, or find out what it was meant for, without either actually or in his mind taking it to pieces? (which pieces, however, let me remind my reader, are utterly useless, except in their relation to the whole)—­I resolved to try something fresh with him.

At this point I had intended to give my readers a theory of mine about the teaching and learning of a language; and tell them how I had found the trial of it succeed in the case of Tom Weir.  But I think this would be too much of a digression from the course of my narrative, and would, besides, be interesting to those only who had given a good deal of thought to subjects belonging to education.  I will only say, therefore, that, by the end of three months, my pupil, without knowing any other Latin author, was able to read any part of the first book of the AEneid—­to read it tolerably in measure, and to enjoy the poetry