I should like to hear it,
because I hope we are going to be friends."
"They call me Geordie Baxter," he replied, as he ran to check the
wanderings of one of the cows, while Grace stood watching him, as she
pondered how she might best frame an invitation asking him to be her
scholar. He seemed so manly and independent, though he was so young;
and, somehow, it was all so different from how she had planned her
finding of scholars. She had been looking for a cottage where the
tattered children might be crawling about the doorstep, making mudpies
and quarrelling with each other; and then she thought she would knock at
the door, after she had spoken to them for a little, and ask their
mother if she might have them to teach on Sunday. But this boy, ignorant
and neglected as he seemed to be, had certainly a manly dignity which
made Grace's invitations more difficult than she expected; though, after
all, he could only spell words of one syllable, and he went neither to
school nor to church. Surely he was the sort of scholar she had been in
search of. So when he returned to his former position opposite the
stepping-stones, after having admonished the straying cow--
"Well, Geordie, I am going to ask you if you will come to Kirklands,
where I live, on Sunday afternoons; and since you do not go to any
school, I can read a little to you, and perhaps help you to learn
something?" said Grace, not venturing to be more explicit on what she
wished to teach.
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