Doddle by the
shoulder, and drawing him towards his chair, looked earnestly into his
face. Then he said quietly, `That will do, Thompson; go to your seat.'

"This was all that occurred at that time. During a whole week the
master tried by every means to get Doddle to learn something; but Doddle
could learn nothing. Yet he seemed to try. He pored over his book, and
muttered with his lips, and sometimes looked anxiously up at the
ceiling, with an expression of agony on his face that seemed to indicate
a tremendous mental effort. Every species of inducement was tried, and
occasionally punishment was resorted to. He was kept in at play-hours,
and put in a corner during school-hours; and once, the master having
lost patience with him, he was flogged. But it was all one to Doddle.
All the methods tried proved utterly unavailing. He could not be got to
acquire a single lesson, and often gave such remarkable answers that we
all believed him to be mad.

"On the Monday forenoon of his second week at the school, the master
called him up again for examination.

"`Now, Thompson,' he began, `you have been a long time over that lesson;
let us see how much of it you have learned. What is etymology?'

"`Etymology,' answered Doddle, `is--is--an irregular pronoun.'

"`Boy!' cried the master sternly.

"`Please, sir,' pleaded Doddle, with deprecatory air, `I--I suppose I
was thinkin' o' one o' the _other_ mologies, not the etty one.'

"`Ha!' ejaculated the master; `well, tell me, how many parts of speech
are there?'

"`Nineteen,' answered the boy, quite confidently.

"`Oh!' exclaimed the master, with a good deal of sarcasm in his tone;
`pray, name them.'

"In a very sing-song voice, and with an air of anxious simplicity,
Doddle began, `Article, noun, adjective, pronoun, verb, adverb,
preposition, conjunction, interjection, outerjection, beginning with
_ies_ in the plural--as, baby, babies; lady, ladies; hady, hadies.
Please, sir, isn't that last one a _bad_ word?'

"`The boy is a lunatic!' muttered the master.

"The boys in the class were far past laughing now; we were absolutely
stunned. The master seemed perplexed, for Doddle was gazing at him with
a look of mild self-satisfaction.

"`I say, Peterkin,' whispered the boy next to me, `as sure as you're
alive that boy's shamming stupid.'

"Presently the master, who had been turning over the leaves of the
grammar in a way that showed he was not conscious of what he