Paradise Garden | Page 6

pupil and his governess awaited us.
I am a little reluctant to admit at this time that my earliest impression of
the subject of these memoirs was disappointing. Perhaps the dead man's
encomiums had raised my hopes. Perhaps the barriers which hedged in
this most exclusive of youngsters had increased his importance in my
thoughts. What I saw was a boy of ten, well grown for his years, who
ambled forward rather sheepishly and gave me a moist and rather
flabby hand to shake.
He was painfully embarrassed. If I had been an ogre and Jerry the
youth allotted for his repast, he could not have shown more distress. He
was distinctly nursery-bred and, of course, unused to visitors, but he
managed a smile, and I saw that he was making the best of a bad job.
After the preliminaries of introduction, amid which Mr. Radford, the
steward of the estate, appeared, I managed to get the boy aside.
"I feel a good deal like the Minotaur, Jerry. Did you ever hear of the
Minotaur?"
He hadn't, and so I told him the story. "But I'm not going to eat you," I
laughed.
I had broken the ice, for a smile, a genuine joyous smile, broke slowly
and then flowed in generous ripples across his face.
"You're different, aren't you?" he said presently, his brown eyes now
gravely appraising me.

"How different, Jerry?" I asked.
He hesitated a moment and then:
"I--I thought you'd come all in black with a lot of grammar books under
your arms."
"I don't use 'em," I said. "I'm a boy, just like you, only I've got long
trousers on. We're not going to bother about books for awhile."
He still inspected me as though he wasn't quite sure it wasn't all a
mistake. And then again:
"Can you talk Latin?"
"Bless you, I'm afraid not."
"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 and showed him how the Indians
trailed their game among the very hills over which we plodded. I told
him that a fine strong body was the greatest thing in the world, a
possession to work for and be proud of. His muscles were flabby, I

knew,