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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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155 seen in the present case: a peacock with a turned-up nose being a novelty in ornithology, and a thing not commonly seen. ‘Hem!’ said Squeers, as if in mild deprecation of this outbreak. ‘He is cheap, my dear; the young man is very cheap.’ ‘Not a bit of it,’ retorted Mrs Squeers. ‘Five pound a year,’ said Squeers. ‘What of that; it’s dear if you don’t want him, isn’t it?’ replied his wife. ‘But we do want him,’ urged Squeers. ‘I don’t see that you want him any more than the dead,’ said Mrs Squeers. ‘Don’t tell me. You can put on the cards and in the advertisements, “Education by Mr Wackford Squeers and able assistants,” without having any assistants, can’t you? Isn’t it done every day by all the masters about? I’ve no patience with you.’ ‘Haven’t you!’ said Squeers, sternly. ‘Now I’ll tell you what, Mrs Squeers. In this matter of having a teacher, I’ll take my own way, if you please. A slave driver in the West Indies is allowed a man under him, to see that his blacks don’t run away, or get up a rebellion; and I’ll have a man under me to do the same with our blacks, till such time as little Wackford is able to take charge of the school.’ ‘Am I to take care of the school when I grow up a man, father?’ said Wackford junior, suspending, in the excess of his delight, a vicious kick which he was administering to his sister. ‘You are, my son,’ replied Mr Squeers, in a sentimental voice. ‘Oh my eye, won’t I give it to the boys!’ exclaimed the interesting child, grasping his father’s cane. ‘Oh, father, won’t I make ’em squeak again!’ It was a proud moment in Mr Squeers’s life, when he witnessed |
