"Oh!" he sighed, though whether in relief or disappointment I couldn't
say.

"But you can do sums in your head and spell hippopotamus?"

"I might," I laughed. "But I wouldn't if I didn't have to."

"But _I'll_ have to, won't I?"

"Oh, some day."

"I'm afraid _I_ never can," he sighed again.

I began to understand now. His mind was feminine and at least three
years backward. There wasn't a mark of the boy of ten about him. But I
liked his eyes. They were wide and inquiring. It wouldn't be difficult
to gain his confidence.

"Are you sorry Miss Redwood is going?" I asked him.

"Yes. She plays games."

"I know some games, too--good ones."

He brightened, but said nothing for a moment, though I saw him
stealing a glance at me. Whatever the object of his inspection, I
seemed to have passed it creditably, for he said rather timidly:

"Would you like to see my bull pup?"

It was the first remark that sounded as though it came from the heart
of a real boy. I had won the first line of entrenchments around
Jerry's reserve. When a boy asks you to see his bull pup he confers
upon you at once the highest mark of his approval.

I only repeat this ingenuous and unimportant conversation to show my
first impression of what seemed to me then to be a rather commonplace
and colorless boy. I did not realize then how strong could be the
effect of such an environment. Miss Redwood, as I soon discovered, was
a timid, wilting individual, who had brought him successfully through
the baby diseases and had taught him the elementary things, because
that was what she was paid for, corrected his table manners and tried
to make him the kind of boy that she would have preferred to be
herself had nature fortunately not decided the matter otherwise, and
chameleon-like, Jerry reflected her tepor, her supineness and
femininity. She recounted his virtues with pride, while I questioned
her, hoping against hope to hear of some prank, the breaking of
window-panes, the burning of a haystack or the explosion of a giant
cracker under the cook. But all to no purpose.

So far as I could discover, he had never so much as pulled the tail
of a cat. As old John Benham had said, of original sin he had none.

But my conviction that the boy had good stuff in him was deepened on
the morrow, when, banishing books, I took him for a breather over hill
and dale, through wood and underbrush, three miles out and three miles
in. I told him stories as we walked