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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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621 neighbour’s turnip field, or sometimes, if it’s a delicate case, a turnip field and a piece of carrots alternately, and let him eat as many as he likes. There an’t better land in the country than this perwerse lad grazed on, and yet he goes and catches cold and indigestion and what not, and then his friends brings a lawsuit against me! Now, you’d hardly suppose,’ added Squeers, moving in his chair with the impatience of an ill-used man, ‘that people’s ingratitude would carry them quite as far as that; would you?’ ‘A hard case, indeed,’ observed Ralph. ‘You don’t say more than the truth when you say that,’ replied Squeers. ‘I don’t suppose there’s a man going, as possesses the fondness for youth that I do. There’s youth to the amount of eight hundred pound a year at Dotheboys Hall at this present time. I’d take sixteen hundred pound worth if I could get ’em, and be as fond of every individual twenty pound among ’em as nothing should equal it!’ ‘Are you stopping at your old quarters?’ asked Ralph. ‘Yes, we are at the Saracen,’ replied Squeers, ‘and as it don’t want very long to the end of the half-year, we shall continney to stop there till I’ve collected the money, and some new boys too, I hope. I’ve brought little Wackford up, on purpose to show to parents and guardians. I shall put him in the advertisement, this time. Look at that boy--himself a pupil. Why he’s a miracle of high feeding, that boy is!’ ‘I should like to have a word with you,’ said Ralph, who had both spoken and listened mechanically for some time, and seemed to have been thinking. ‘As many words as you like, sir,’ rejoined Squeers. ‘Wackford, you go and play in the back office, and don’t move about too much |
