Part 9 (2/2)
”Very well, my learned friend, Mr. Mat Kevanagh, isn't this precisely what is called a hedge-school?”
”A hedge-school!” replied Mat, highly offended; ”my seminary a hedge-school! No, sir; I scorn the cognomen in toto. This, sir, is a Cla.s.sical and Mathematical Seminary, under the personal superintendence of your humble servant.”
”Sir,” replied the other master, who till then was silent, wis.h.i.+ng, perhaps, to sack Mat in presence of the gentlemen, ”it is a hedge-school; and he is no scholar, but an ignoramus, whom I'd sack in three minutes, that would be ashamed of a hedge-school.”
”Ay,” says Mat, changing his tone, and taking the cue from his friend, whose learning he dreaded, ”it's just for argument's sake, a hedge-school; and, what is more, I scorn to be ashamed of it.”
”And do you not teach occasionally under the hedge behind the house here?”
”Granted,” replied Mat; ”and now where's your _vis consequentiae?_”
”Yes,” subjoined the other, ”produce your _vis consequentiae_; but any one may know by a glance that the divil a much of it's about you.”
The Englishman himself was rather at a loss for the _vis consequentiae_, and replied, ”Why don't you live, and learn, and teach like civilized beings, and not a.s.semble like wild a.s.ses--pardon me, my friend, for the simile--at least like wild colts, in such cl.u.s.ters behind the ditches?”
”A cl.u.s.ther of wild coults!” said Mat; ”that shows what you are; no man of cla.s.sical larnin' would use such a word. If you had stuck at the a.s.ses, we know it's a subject you're at home in--ha! ha! ha!--but you brought the joke on yourself, your honor--that is, if it is a joke--ha!
ha! ha!”
”Permit me, sir,” replied the strange master, ”to ax your honor one question--did you receive a cla.s.sical education? Are you college-bred?”
”Yes,” replied the Englishman; ”I can reply to both in the affirmative.
I'm a Cantabrigian.”
”You are a what?” asked Mat.
”I am a Cantabrigian.”
”Come, sir, you must explain yourself, if you plase. I'll take my oath that's neither a cla.s.sical nor a mathematical tarm.”
The gentleman smiled. ”I was educated in the English College of Cambridge.”
”Well,” says Mat, ”and may be you would be as well off if you had picked up your larnin' in our own Thrinity; there's good picking in Thrinity, for gentlemen like you, that are sober, and harmless about the brains, in regard of not being overly bright.”
”You talk with contempt of a hedge-school,” replied the other master.
”Did you never hear, for all so long as you war in Cambridge, of a nate little spot in Greece called the groves of Academus?
”'Inter lucos Academi quarrere verum.'
”What was Plato himself but a hedge schoolmaster? and, with humble submission, it casts no slur on an Irish tacher to be compared to him, I think. You forget also, sir, that the Dhruids taught under their oaks: eh?”
”Ay,” added Mat, ”and the Tree of Knowledge, too. Faith, an' if that same tree was now in being, if there wouldn't be hedge schoolmasters, there would be plenty of hedge scholars, any how--particularly if the fruit was well tasted.”
”I believe, Millbank, you must give in,” said Squire Johnston. ”I think you have got the worst of it.”
”Why,” said Mat, ”if the gintleman's not afther bein' sacked clane, I'm not here.”
”Are you a mathematician?” inquired Mat's friend, determined to follow up his victory; ”do you know Mensuration?”
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