st hedge-trimmer, all
loved Jerry and Jerry loved them all. He had that kind of nature. He
couldn't help loving those about him any more than he could help
breathing, and yet it must not be supposed that the boy was lacking in
discernment. Our failings, weaknesses and foibles were a constant
source of amusement to him, but his humor was without malice and his
jibes were friendly, and he ran the gamut of my own exposed nerve
pulps with such joyous consideration that I came to like the
operation. He loved me and I knew it.

But nothing could make him love his Latin grammar. He worried through
arithmetic and algebra and blarneyed his French and German tutors into
making them believe he knew more than he did, but the purely
scientific aspects of learning did not interest him. It was only when
he knew enough to read the great epics in the original that my
patience had its reward. The Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid held him
in thrall, and by some magic eliminated at a bound the purely
mechanical difficulties which had fettered him. Hector, Achilles,
Agamemnon, Ulysses--Jerry was each of these in turn, lacking only the
opportunity to vanquish heroic foes or capture impregnable cities.

I had not censored the Homeric gods, as Jerry's father had commanded,
and my temerity led to difficulties. It began with Calypso and Ulysses
and did not even end when Dido was left alone upon the shores of
Carthage.

"I don't understand it at all," he said one day with a wrinkled brow,
"how a man of the caliber of Ulysses could stay so long the prisoner
of Calypso, a woman, when he wanted to go home. It's a pretty shabby
business for a hero and a demigod. A woman!" he sneered, "I'd like to
see any woman keep me sitting in a cave if I wanted to go anywhere!"

His braggadicio was the full-colored boyish reflection of the Canby
point of view. I had merely shrugged woman out of existence. Now Jerry
castigated her.

"What could she do?" he went on scornfully. "She couldn't shoot or run
or fight. All she did was to lie around or strut about with a veil
around her head and a golden girdle (sensible costume!) and serve the
hero with ambrosia and ruddy nectar. I've never eaten ambrosia, but
I'm pretty sure it was some sweet, sticky stuff, like _her_." There is
no measure for the contempt of his accents.

"She could swim," I ventured timidly.

"Swim! Even a fish can swim!"

I don't know why, but at this conversation, the first of Jerry's
mature