The Blue Lagoon - A Romance - Book I

This stumped Emmeline for a moment.

"It's where places are," she said at last.

"Which places?" enquired he.

"All sorts of places," replied Emmeline. "Mr Button!"

"What is it, darlin'?"

"Would you like to learn g'ography?"

"I'm not wishful for larnin'," said the other hurriedly. "It makes me head buzz to hear them things they rade out of books."

"Paddy," said Dick, who was strong on drawing that afternoon, "look here." He drew the following on the sand: [Illustration: A bad drawing of an elephant] "That's an elephant," he said in a dubious voice.

Mr Button grunted, and the sound was by no means filled with enthusiastic assent. A chill fell on the proceedings.

Dick wiped the elephant slowly and regretfully out, whilst Emmeline felt disheartened. Then her face suddenly cleared; the seraphic smile came into it for a moment--a bright idea had struck her.

"Dicky," she said, "draw Henry the Eight."

Dick's face brightened. He cleared the sand and drew a figure.

"THAT'S not Henry the Eight," he explained, "but he will be in a minute. Daddy showed me how to draw him; he's nothing till he gets his hat on."

"Put his hat on, put his hat on!" implored Emmeline, gazing alternately from the figure on the sand to Mr Button's face, watching for the delighted smile with which she was sure the old man would greet the great king when he appeared in all his glory.

Then Dick with a single stroke of the cane put Henry's hat on.

Now no portrait could be liker to his monk-hunting majesty than the above, created with one stroke of a cane (so to speak), yet Mr Button remained unmoved.

"I did it for Mrs Sims," said Dick regretfully, "and she said it was the image of him."

"Maybe the hat's not big enough," said Emmeline, turning her head from side to side as she gazed at the picture. It looked right, but she felt there must be something wrong, as Mr Button did not applaud. Has not every true artist felt the same before the silence of some critic?

Mr Button tapped the ashes out of his pipe and rose to stretch himself, and the class rose and trooped down to the lagoon edge, leaving Henry and his hat a figure on the sand to be obliterated by the wind.

After a while, as time went on, Mr Button took to his lessons as a matter of course, the small inventions of the children assisting their utterly untrustworthy knowledge. Knowledge, perhaps, as useful as any other there amidst the lovely poetry of the palm trees and the sky.