a second volume which ella carried proudly under her arm when she went to the french class was called “le grandpère.” it was written expressly for the use of schools—so said the title-page. it was “approuvé par le conseil royal de l’instruction publique.” if further proof was needed of its value, the fact that it was “carefully prepared for american schools” was surely sufficient. how could anything be better for a child to translate?
“le grandpère” began, with unpardonable guile, quite like a story: “the old captain granville inhabited a pretty village situated on the shore of the loire,” as ella slowly translated it. but her suspicions were soon aroused, for, looking ahead a few lines, she found something about “charging himself with overseeing their first education.” that did not sound promising, though it was possible that the four grandsons who were being educated might do interesting things betweentimes. as she read further, she found that the grandfather educated them by taking them to walk every sunday and giving them instructive lectures. now in ella’s experience nice children did not study their lessons on sunday, neither[pg 12] did they go to walk. it is true that occasionally, after they had been to church and sunday school, had eaten the cold sunday dinner, and had read their sunday-school books through, they were allowed to take a quiet, almost awesome walk up and down the paths of the nearest cemetery and talk about the flowers or their books; but this was quite different from an everyday stroll off into the country.
the four boys and their “grandpère,” however, wandered off shamelessly every sunday—in the forenoon, too, when by all the customs of ella’s sunday mornings they should have been at church. it was true that occasionally their grandfather gave them a moral lecture on a sunday morning, but these lectures were often a puzzle to ella’s eight-year-old theology. for instance, she had, of course, been taught to do what she knew was right, but she was quite at sea when “jules” confessed that he had struck his brother, and declared, “laying his hand upon his heart,” that “something here” told him he had done wrong. ella laid her hand over the place where she supposed her heart to lie, but nothing made any remarks to her. she concluded that it was because she was not quite bad enough just then, and she made up her mind that—although of course she would not do anything wrong on purpose—yet the next time that she was naughty, she would watch carefully to see if she heard any conversation in the vicinity of her heart.
[pg 13]
it was somewhat of a pity that ella’s lessons made so little impression upon the bulk of “le grandpère,” for it was quite an amazing book, and to know it would have been a widely distended, if not a liberal education. it began, indeed, so simply that ella was disgusted, for these boys, old enough to live in a seminary like herself, actually were amazed when they saw the sun, and appealed to their grandfather to tell them what it was. ella did not appreciate the exigencies of authorship or realize that there must be something on which to hang a small lecture about the heavenly bodies.
further on there were discourses on the five senses, on how to count, on the history of the french sovereigns; and then the chapters gradually worked on through slavery, avarice, extravagance, the massacre of saint bartholomew’s day, vaccination, and leprosy. what could have been better for a child? any deficiencies that in later times manifested themselves in ella’s education may be fairly ascribed to her never having completed the translation of this profound volume.
in ella’s study of french, there was one thing that puzzled her greatly. she was willing to believe that french people understood french, but that they ever really knew it as she knew english without studying fasquelle and “le grandpère” was something that she could hardly accept as truth. then, too, the mother had told her that she had had a great-great-grandfather[pg 14] who was a frenchman; and she often wondered whether, if she had lived in his day, they would have been able to talk together. she could have said, “have you the knife of the brother of the carpenter?” but unless he made the proper reply, “no, but i have the pencil of the sister of the dressmaker,” she would not have known what to say next. she could never have said, “great-great-grandfather, will you take me to ride this afternoon?” because that was not in fasquelle.
she wondered if the french people really talked french every day, or only when they had company. after long deliberation, she came to the conclusion that they probably talked french all the time, but that of course they thought in english. these were the grown-ups. as for the children, no one could expect them to talk french, certainly not when they were playing. she wished she had one of them to play with. it would be almost like meeting her great-great-grandfather as a little boy.
of course ella “practiced.” in the sixties, boys “took lessons” only if they showed some talent for music, but girls were expected, talent or no talent, to spend in solitary confinement two hours a day at hard labor on the piano. in ella’s case, the two hours were lessened to one by her mother’s decree, and “solitary confinement” was not added to the hard labor, because, when the sad moment had arrived, a genial “bow-wow!” was always heard and a big black[pg 15] shaggy head, followed by the rest of a great newfoundland dog, pushed open the door. if it chanced to be the day for ella’s lesson, ponto waved a friendly apology to the teacher and withdrew; but on other days he stretched himself out under the piano, and with a sigh of toleration proceeded to sleep away the time until the hour was up. he never failed to hear the first stroke of the bell, and if ella did not stop on the instant, he slipped his great muzzle under her wrists and lifted them up from the keys.
ella, like most children, had a healthy dislike of practicing. it was such an unmanageable interference with her plans. “you like french and you like arithmetic,” said her puzzled teacher; “why is it that you do not like music?”
ella pondered a minute, then she said: “it’s because there isn’t any way to get the better of it. if i have arithmetic to do, i can work hard and then i can say, ‘there, you old thing, i’ve done you in half the time you wanted me to spend, and now ponto and i are going to the lake in spite of you.’ but no matter how hard i practice, an hour is always an hour, and there isn’t any way to make it shorter.”
of course ella hated to count. bribes were offered. “my music teacher said that if i would count three weeks without stopping, she would give me a piece,” ella wrote in her little diary. in spite of the promised “piece,” however, “one, two, three, four,” became as tiresome as the multiplication table, and at length[pg 16] she invented a way to make the time pass; she played very loud with one hand and at the same time patted ponto with the other.
she felt a little guilty when her music teacher said: “i heard you practicing two or three measures over and over this morning, ella, and i thought what a good lesson you were going to have to-morrow.”
ella did not reply, and she forgot to listen to see whether her heart would make any speeches to her. she didn’t like practicing, and she didn’t, and when she heard of remarkable little girls no older than she who had taken only twelve lessons and could play “two pieces” already, she did not care very much that she could play only one. neither did ponto.
ella had a reason for not caring. she firmly expected that some day, even without that wearisome “one, two, three, four,” she would play as well as the little girl with two pieces, perhaps even as well as her teacher. it was all very simple and very logical. the teacher wore a ring with a bright red stone in it and was able to play; by and by she would have a ring with a bright red stone, and then of course she would be able to play. ella knew that the grown-ups would laugh at her if she told them her fancy, so she only whispered it into ponto’s ear. dogs could understand, but grown-ups could not.
like most children, ella was younger than her years in some ways and older in others. she could cherish a belief in the efficacy of a ring to give her musical ability, and she could sit in a class with[pg 17] “ladies and gentlemen” more than twice her age without a thought of this being anything remarkable. of course she knew that the children in the village went to school with boys and girls of their own years; but this was nothing; they did one thing and she did another, that was all. she even took it as a matter of course when in the “institute reporter,” the little four-page sheet that glorified the seminary with printers’ ink, she saw her own name among the other “ladies.” it had, too, a special mark of honor in the shape of an asterisk indicating that she was “in studies of the english and classical graduating course.” to be sure, no one of her studies was classical, and she was many years removed from graduation, but it made one more name on the list.
as to the english, she really wrote with some degree of correctness because she had never seen writings that were incorrect, and she was quite aghast when she first heard the correction of compositions in class. she wrote to her uncle, “i can’t stop for dates. i want to tell you what funny compositions some of the scholars write. one great boy wrote his and commenced every word with a capital letter. i have not quite got to doing that.” ella thoroughly enjoyed making tiny blankbooks and composing equally tiny stories carefully adjusted to the little pages. she even manufactured a paper for children, composing, editing, and copying it all herself.
every monday evening the “lyceum” was held, an exercise which was expected to develop the literary[pg 18] ability of the students. ella had joined it as a matter of course, and when called on for a recitation, she had given “over the river” in her best style. when the second call came, she decided, possibly with a latent instinct for advertising, to read the first number of her paper. this was not exactly an innovation, for the “lyceum” already rejoiced in a paper called “the alpha.”
ella’s paper was named “little pearls.” how the “ladies and gentlemen” and the august faculty kept their faces straight during its presentation is a mystery. it contained a few conundrums, whose answers were promised “in our next,” but otherwise it was carefully modeled on the weekly paper of the sunday school. there were letters from children with the patronizing comments of the editor; there was an original story or two; and the sheet ended with the tragic tale, drawn from the little editor’s own experience, of a tiny fish, caught and brought home from the lake. i fear that the writer had never been properly trained in “nature study,” for she stated that the fish jumped out of the water and was found “lying upon its back,” dead, and she declared, “although a cat has nine lives, a fish has only one, and therefore it always stayed dead forever after.” whether this literary production lengthened the list of subscribers, no one can say; but certainly ella’s minute cash account showed no marked increase of income on that date.
