Page:Hardings luck - nesbit.djvu/207

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DICKIE LEARNS MANY THINGS
165

grown used to thine own place. Thou'lt have lessons alone to-day. One of the cousins goes with his mother to be her page and bear her train at the King's revels at Whitehall, and the other must sit and sew her sampler. Her mother says she hath run wild too long."

So Dickie had lessons alone with his detested tutor, and his relief from the panic fear of the morning raised his spirits to a degree that unfortunately found vent in what was, for him, extreme naughtiness. He drew a comic picture of his tutor—it really was rather like—with a scroll coming out of his mouth, and on the scroll the words, "Because I am ugly I need not be hateful!" His tutor, who had a nasty way of creeping up behind people, came up behind him at the wrong moment. Dickie was caned on both hands and kept in. Also his dinner was of bread and water, and he had to write out two hundred times, "I am a bad boy, and I ask the pardon of my good tutor. The fifth day of November, 1608." So he did not see his aunt and cousin in their Whitehall finery—and it was quite late in the afternoon before he even saw his other cousin, who had been sampler-sewing. He would not have written out the lines, he felt sure he would not, only he thought of his cousin and wanted to see her again. For she was the only little girl friend he had.

When the last was done he rushed into the room where she was—he was astonished to find that he knew his way about the house quite