heard of anything he made that wasn't worth attending to.

The young man begged the Lady to pardon anything that might sound
harshly in these crude thoughts of his. He had been taught strange
things, he said, from old theologies, when he was a child, and had
thought his way out of many of his early superstitions. As for the Young
Girl, our Scheherezade, he said to her that she must have got dreadfully
tired (at which she colored up and said it was no such thing), and he
promised that, to pay for her goodness in listening, he would give her a
lesson in astronomy the next fair evening, if she would be his scholar,
at which she blushed deeper than before, and said something which
certainly was not No.

IX

There was no sooner a vacancy on our side of the table, than the Master
proposed a change of seats which would bring the Young Astronomer into
our immediate neighborhood. The Scarabee was to move into the place of
our late unlamented associate, the Man of Letters, so called. I was to
take his place, the Master to take mine, and the young man that which
had been occupied by the Master. The advantages of this change were
obvious. The old Master likes an audience, plainly enough; and with
myself on one side of him, and the young student of science, whose
speculative turn is sufficiently shown in the passages from his poem,
on the other side, he may feel quite sure of being listened to. There
is only one trouble in the arrangement, and that is that it brings this
young man not only close to us, but also next to our Scheherezade.

I am obliged to confess that he has shown occasional marks of
inattention even while the Master was discoursing in a way that I found
agreeable enough. I am quite sure it is no intentional disrespect to the
old Master. It seems to me rather that he has become interested in the
astronomical lessons he has been giving the Young Girl. He has studied
so much alone, that it is naturally a pleasure to him to impart some of
his knowledge. As for his young pupil, she has often thought of being
a teacher herself, so that she is of course very glad to acquire any
accomplishment that may be useful to her in that capacity. I do not see
any reason why some of the boarders should have made such remarks as
they have done. One cannot teach astronomy to advantage, without going
out of doors, though I confess that when two young people go out by
daylight to study the stars, as these young folks have done on