When Zack's turn came, the old fellow replied
promptly:
"Zack Lurvey, fifty-eight years, five months and eighteen days."
"Zack?" the master queried in some perplexity. "Does that stand for
Zachary? How do you spell it?"
"I never spelled it," old Zack replied with a grin. "I'm here to larn
how. Fact is, I'm jest a leetle backward."
The young master began to realize that he was in for something
extraordinary. In truth, he had the time of his life there that winter.
Not that old Zack misbehaved; on the contrary, he was a model of
studiousness and was very anxious to learn. But education went hard with
him at first; he was more than a week in learning his letters and sat by
the hour, making them on a slate, muttering them aloud, sometimes
vehemently, with painful groans. M and W gave him constant trouble; and
so did B and R. He grew so wrathful over his mistakes at times that he
thumped the desk with his fist, and once he hurled his primer at the
stove.
"Why did they make the measly little things look so much alike!" he
cried.
He wished to skip the letters altogether and to learn to read by the
looks of the words; but the master assured him that he must learn the
alphabet first if he wished to learn to write later, and finally he
prevailed with the stubborn old man.
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