Sam Buckley’s Education.

This narrative which I am now writing is neither more nor less than an account of what befell certain of my acquaintances during a period extending over nearly, or quite, twenty years, interspersed, and let us hope embellished, with descriptions of the country in which these circumstances took place, and illustrated by conversations well known to me by frequent repetition, selected as throwing light upon the characters of the persons concerned. Episodes there are, too, which I have thought it worth while to introduce as being more or less interesting, as bearing on the manners of a country but little known, out of which materials it is difficult to select those most proper to make my tale coherent; yet such has been my object, neither to dwell on the one hand unnecessarily on the more unimportant passages, nor on the other hand to omit anything which may be supposed to bear on the general course of events.

Now, during all the time above mentioned, I, Geoffry Hamlyn, have happened to lead a most uninteresting, and with few exceptions prosperous existence. I was but little concerned, save as a hearer, in the catalogue of exciting accidents and offences which I chronicle. I have looked on with the deepest interest at the lovemaking, and ended a bachelor; I have witnessed the fighting afar off, only joining the battle when I could not help it, yet I am a steady old fogey, with a mortal horror of a disturbance of any sort. I have sat drinking with the wine-bibbers, and yet at sixty my hand is as steady as a rock. Money has come to me by mere accumulation; I have taken more pains to spend it than to make it; in short, all through my life’s drama, I have been a spectator, and not an actor, and so in this story I shall keep myself as much as possible in the background, only appearing personally when I cannot help it.

Acting on this resolve I must now make my CONGE, and bid you farewell for a few years, and go back to those few sheep which James Stockbridge and I own in the wilderness, and continue the history of those who are more important than myself. I must push on too, for there is a long period of dull stupid prosperity coming to our friends at Baroona and Toonarbin, which we must get over as quickly as is decent. Little Sam Buckley also, though at present a most delightful child, will soon be a mere uninteresting boy. We must teach him to read and write, and ride, and what not, as soon as possible, and see if we can’t find a young lady — well, I won’t anticipate, but go on. Go on, did I say? — jump on, rather — two whole years at once.

See Baroona now. Would you know it? I think not. That hut where we spent the pleasant Christmas-day you know of is degraded into the kitchen, and seems moved backward, although it stands in the same place, for a new house is built nearer the river, quite overwhelming the old slab hut in its grandeur — a long low wooden house, with deep cool verandahs all round, already festooned with passion-flowers, and young grapevines, and fronted by a flower garden, all a-blaze with petunias and geraniums.

It was a summer evening, and all the French windows reaching to the ground were open to admit the cool south wind, which had just come up, deliciously icily cold after a scorching day. In the verandah sat the Major and the Doctor over their claret (for the Major had taken to dining late again now, to his great comfort), and in the garden were Mrs. Buckley and Sam watering the flowers, attended by a man who drew water from a new-made reservoir near the house.

“I think, Doctor,” said the Major, “that the habit of dining in the middle of the day is a gross abuse of the gifts of Providence, and I’ll prove it to you. What does a man dine for? — answer me that.”

“To satisfy his hunger, I should say,” answered the Doctor.

“Pooh! pooh! stuff and nonsense, my good friend,” said the Major; “you are speaking at random. I suppose you will say, then, that a black fellow is capable of dining?”

“Highly capable, as far as I can judge from what I have seen,” replied the Doctor. “A full-grown fighting black would be ashamed if he couldn’t eat a leg of mutton at a sitting.”

“And you call that DINING?” said the Major. “I call it gorging. Why, those fellows are more uncomfortable after food than before. I have seen them sitting close before the fire and rubbing their stomachs with mutton fat to reduce the swelling. Ha! ha! ha! — dining, eh? Oh, Lord!”

“Then if you don’t dine to satisfy your hunger, what the deuce do you eat dinners for at all?” asked the Doctor.

“Why,” said the Major, spreading his legs out before him with a benign smile, and leaning back in his chair, “I eat my dinner, not so much for the sake of the dinner itself, as for the after-dinnerish feeling which follows: a feeling that you have nothing to do, and that if you had you’d be shot if you’d do it. That, to return to where I started from, is why I won’t dine in in the middle of the day.”

“If that is the way you feel after dinner, I certainly wouldn’t.”

“All the most amiable feelings in the human breast,” continued the Major, “are brought out in their full perfection by dinner. If a fellow were to come to me now and ask me to lend him ten pounds, I’d do it, provided, you know, that he would fetch out the cheque-book and pen and ink.”

“Laziness is nothing,” said the Doctor, “unless well carried out. I only contradicted you, however, to draw you out; I agree entirely. Do you know, my friend, I am getting marvellously fond of this climate.”

“So am I. But then you know, Doctor, that we are sheltered from the north wind here by the snow-ranges. The summer in Sydney, now, is perfectly infernal. The dust is so thick you can’t see your hand before you.”

“So I believe,” said the Doctor. “By the bye, I got a new butterfly today; rather an event, mind you, here, where there are so few.”

“What is he?”

“An Hipparchia,” said the Doctor, “Sam saw him first and gave chase.”

“You seem to be making quite a naturalist of my boy, Doctor. I am sincerely obliged to you. If we can make him take to that sort of thing it may keep him out of much mischief.”

“He will never get into much,” said the Doctor, “unless I am mistaken; he is the most docile child I ever came across. It is a pleasure to be with him. What are you going to do with him?”

“He must go to school, I am afraid,” said the Major with a sigh, “I can’t bring my heart to part with him; but his mother has taught him all she knows, so I suppose he must go to school and fight, and get flogged, and come home with a pipe in his mouth, and an oath on his lips, with his education completed. I don’t fancy his staying here among these convict servants, when he is old enough to learn mischief.”

“He’ll learn as much mischief at a colonial school, I expect,” said the Doctor, “and more too. All the evil he hears from these fellows will be like the water on a duck’s back; whereas, if you send him to school in a town, he’ll learn a dozen vices he’ll never hear of here. Get him a tutor.”

“That is easier said than done, Doctor. It is very hard to get a respectable tutor in the colony.”

“Here is one at your hand,” said the Doctor. “Take me.”

“My dear friend,” said the Major, jumping up, “I would not have dared to ask such a thing. If you would undertake him for a short time?”

“I will undertake the boy’s education altogether. Potztausend, and why not! It will be a labour of love, and therefore the more thoroughly done. What shall he learn, now?”

“That I must leave to you.”

“A weighty responsibility,” said the Doctor. “No Latin or Greek, I suppose? They will be no use to him here.”

“Well — no; I suppose not. But I should like him to learn his Latin grammar. You may depend upon it there’s something in the Latin grammar.”

“What use has it been to you, Major?”

“Why, the least advantage it has been to me is to give me an insight into the construction of languages, which is some use. But while I was learning the Latin grammar, I learnt other things besides, of more use than the construction of any languages, living or dead. First, I learnt that there were certain things in this world that MUST be done. Next, that there were people in this world, of whom the Masters of Eton were a sample, whose orders must be obeyed without question. Third, I found that it was pleasanter in all ways to do one’s duty than to leave it undone. And last, I found out how to bear a moderate amount of birching without any indecent outcry.”

“All very useful things,” said the Doctor. “Teach a boy one thing well, and you show him how to learn others. History, I suppose?”

“As much as you like, Doctor. His mother has taught him his catechism, and all that sort of thing, and she is the fit person, you know. With the exception of that and the Latin grammar, I trust everything to your discretion.”

“There is one thing I leave to you, Major, if you please, and that is corporal chastisement. I am not at all sure that I could bring myself to flog Sam, and, if I did, it would be very inefficiently done.”

“Oh, I’ll undertake it,” said the Major, “though I believe I shall have an easy task. He won’t want much flogging.”

At this moment Mrs. Buckley approached with a basketful of fresh-gathered flowers. “The roses don’t flower well here, Doctor,” she said, “but the geraniums run mad. Here is a salmon-coloured one for your button-hole.”

“He has earned it well, Agnes,” said her husband. “He has decided the discussion we had last night by offering to undertake Sam’s education himself.”

“And God’s blessing on him for it!” said Mrs. Buckley warmly. “You have taken a great load off my mind, Doctor. I should never have been happy if that boy had gone to school. Come here, Sam.”

Sam came bounding into the verandah, and clambered up on his father, as if he had been a tree. He was now eleven years old, and very tall and wellformed for his age. He was a good-looking boy, with regular features, and curly chestnut hair. He had, too, the large grey-blue eye of his father, an eye that never lost for a moment its staring expression of kindly honesty, and the lad’s whole countenance was one which, without being particularly handsome, or even very intelligent, won an honest man’s regard at first sight.

“My dear Sam,” said his mother, “leave off playing with your father’s hair, and listen to me, for I have something serious to say to you. Last night your father and I were debating about sending you to school, but Doctor Mulhaus has himself offered to be your tutor, thereby giving you advantages, for love, which you never could have secured for money. Now, the least we can expect of you, my dear boy, is that you will be docile and attentive to him.”

“I will try, Doctor dear,” said Sam. “But I am very stupid sometimes, you know.”

So the good Doctor, whose head was stored with nearly as much of human knowledge as mortal head could hold, took simple, guileless little Sam by the hand, and led him into the garden of knowledge. Unless I am mistaken, these two will pick more flowers than they will dig potatoes in the aforesaid garden, but I don’t think that two such honest souls will gather much unwholesome fruit. The danger is that they will waste their time, which is no danger at all, but a certainty.

I believe that such an education as our Sam got from the Doctor would have made a slattern and a faineant out of half the boys in England. If Sam had been a clever boy, or a conceited boy, he would have ended with a superficial knowledge of things in general, imagining he knew everything when he knew nothing, and would have been left in the end, without a faith either religious or political, a useless, careless man.

This danger the Doctor foresaw in the first month, and going to the Major abruptly, as he walked up and down the garden, took his arm, and said —

“See here, Buckley. I have undertaken to educate that boy of yours, and every day I like the task better, and yet every day I see that I have undertaken something beyond me. His appetite for knowledge is insatiable, but he is not an intellectual boy; he makes no deductions of his own, but takes mine for granted. He has no commentary on what he learns, but that of a dissatisfied idealist like me, a man who has been thrown among circumstances sufficiently favourable to make a prime minister out of some men, and yet who has ended by doing nothing. Another thing: this is my first attempt at education, and I have not the schoolmaster’s art to keep him to details. Every day I make new resolutions, and every day I break them. The boy turns his great eyes upon me in the middle of some humdrum work, and asks me a question. In answering, I get off the turnpike road, and away we go from lane to lane, from one subject to another, until lesson-time is over, and nothing done. And, if it were merely time wasted, it could be made up, but he remembers every word I say, and believes in it like gospel, when I myself couldn’t remember half of it to save my life. Now, my dear fellow, I consider your boy to be a very sacred trust to me, and so I have mentioned all this to you, to give you an opportunity of removing him to where he might be under a stricter discipline, if you thought fit. If he was like some boys, now, I should resign my post at once but, as it is, I shall wait till you turn me out, for two reasons. The first is, that I take such delight in my task, that I do not care to relinquish it; and the other is, that the lad is naturally so orderly and gentle, that he does not need discipline, like most boys.”

“My dear Doctor,” replied Major Buckley, “listen to me. If we were in England, and Sam could go to Eton, which, I take it you know, is the best school in the world, I would still earnestly ask you to continue your work. He will probably inherit a great deal of money, and will not have to push his way in the world by his brains; so that close scholarship will be rather unnecessary. I should like him to know history well and thoroughly; for he may mix in the political life of this little colony by and by. Latin grammar, you know,” he said, laughing, “is indispensable. Doctor, I trust my boy with you because I know that you will make him a gentleman, as his mother, with God’s blessing, will make him a Christian.”

So, the Doctor buckled to his task again, with renewed energy; to Euclid, Latin grammar, and fractions. Sam’s good memory enabled him to make light of the grammar, and the fractions too were no great difficulty, but the Euclid was an awful trial. He couldn’t make out what it was all about. He got on very well until he came nearly to the end of the first book, and then getting among the parallelogram “props,” as we used to call them (may their fathers’ graves be defiled!), he stuck dead. For a whole evening did he pore patiently over one of them till A B, setting to C D, crossed hands, poussetted, and whirled round “in Sahara waltz” through his throbbing head. Bed-time, but no rest! Whether he slept or not he could not tell. Who could sleep with that long-bodied, ill-tempered-looking parallelogram A H standing on the bed-clothes, and crying out, in tones loud enough to waken the house, that it never had been, nor never would be equal to the fat jolly square C K? So, in the morning, Sam woke to the consciousness that he was farther off from the solution than ever, but, having had a good cry, went into the study and tackled to it again.

No good! Breakfast time, and matters much worse! That long peaked-nose vixen of a triangle A H C, which yesterday Sam had made out was equal to half the parallelogram and half the square, now had the audacity to declare that she had nothing to do with either of them; so what was to be done now?

After breakfast Sam took his book and went out to his father, who was sitting smoking in the verandah. He clambered up on to his knee, and then began:—

“Father, dear, see here; can you understand this? You’ve got to prove, you know — oh, dear! I’ve forgot that now.”

“Let’s see,” said the Major; “I am afraid this is a little above me. There’s Brentwood, now, could do it; he was in the Artillery, you know, and learnt fortification, and that sort of thing. I don’t think I can make much hand of it, Sam.”

But Sam had put his head upon his father’s shoulder, and was crying bitterly.

“Come, come, my old man,” said the Major, “don’t give way, you know; don’t be beat.”

“I can’t make it out at all,” said Sam, sobbing. “I’ve got such a buzzing in my head with it! And if I can’t do it I must stop; because I can’t go on to the next till I understand this. Oh, dear me!”

“Lay your head there a little, my boy, till it gets clearer; then perhaps you will be able to make it out. You may depend on it that you ought to learn it, or the good Doctor wouldn’t have set it to you: never let a thing beat you, my son.”

So Sam cried on his father’s shoulder a little, and then went in with his book; and not long after, the Doctor looked in unperceived, and saw the boy with his elbows on the table and the book before him. Even while he looked a big tear fell plump into the middle of A H; so the Doctor came quietly in and said —

“Can’t you manage it, Sam?”

Sam shook his head.

“Just give me hold of the book; will you, Sam?”

Sam complied without word or comment; the Doctor sent it flying through the open window, halfway down the garden. “There!” said he, nodding his head, “that’s the fit place for him this day: you’ve had enough of him at present; go and tell one of the blacks to dig some worms, and we’ll make holiday and go a fishing.”

Sam looked at the Doctor, and then through the window at his old enemy lying in the middle of the flowerbed. He did not like to see the poor book, so lately his master, crumpled and helpless, fallen from its high estate so suddenly. He would have gone to its assistance, and picked it up and smoothed it, the more so as he felt that he had been beaten.

The Doctor seemed to see everything. “Let it lie here, my child,” he said; “you are not in a position to assist a fallen enemy; you are still the vanquished party. Go and get the worms.”

He went, and when he came back he found the Doctor sitting beside his father in the verandah, with a penknife in one hand and the ace of spades in the other. He cut the card into squares, triangles, and parallelograms, while Sam looked on, and, demonstrating as he went, fitted them one into the other, till the boy saw his bugbear of a proposition made as clear as day before his eyes.

“Why,” said Sam, “that’s all as clear as need be. I understand it. Now may I pick the book up, Doctor?”

History was the pleasantest part of all Sam’s tasks, for they would sit in the little room given up for a study, with the French windows open looking on the flower-garden, Sam reading aloud and the Doctor making discursive commentaries. At last, one day the Doctor said —

“My boy, we are making too much of a pleasure of this: you must really learn your dates. Now tell me the date of the accession of Edward the Sixth.”

No returns.

“Ah! I thought so: we must not be so discursive. We’ll learn the dates of the Grecian History, as being an effort of memory, you not having read it yet.”

But this plan was rather worse than the other; for one morning, Sam having innocently asked, at half-past eleven, what the battle of Thermopylae was, Mrs. Buckley coming in, at one, to call them to lunch, found the Doctor, who had begun the account of that glorious fight in English, and then go............