"Cannot you, do not you understand?" the teacher shouted, beside himself.

The boy was silent, and looked at the pedant contemptuously.

"Are you dumb?"

He remained silent. He was too old to be beaten; besides, this form of punishment was gradually being disused. He was therefore told to sit down.

He could translate the text into Swedish, but not in the way the teacher wished. That the teacher only permitted one way of translating seemed to him silly. He had already rushed through Cornelius in a few weeks, and this deliberate, unreasonable crawling when one could run, depressed him. He saw no sense in it.

The same kind of thing happened in the history lessons. "Now, John," the teacher would say, "tell me what you know about Gustav I."

The boy stands up, and his vagrant thoughts express themselves as follows: "What I know about Gustav I. Oh! a good deal. But I knew that when I was in the lowest class (he is now in the fourth), and the master knows it too. What is the good of repeating it all again?"

"Well! is that all you know?"

He had not said a word about Gustav I., and his school-fellows laughed. Now he felt angry, and tried to speak, but the words stuck in his throat. How should he begin? Gustav was born at Lindholm, in the province of Roslagen. Yes, but he and the teacher knew that long ago. How stupid to oblige him to repeat it.

"Ah, well!" continues the teacher, "you don't know your lesson, you know nothing of Gustav I." Now he opens his mouth, and says curtly and decidedly: "Yes, I know his history well."

"If you do, why don't you answer?"

The master's question seems to him a very stupid one, and now he will not answer. He drives away all thoughts about Gustav I. and forces himself to think of other things, the maps on the wall, the lamp hanging from the ceiling. He pretends to be deaf.

"Sit down, you don't know your lesson," says the master. He sits down, and lets his thoughts wander where they will, after he has settled in his own mind that the master has told a falsehood.

In this there was a kind of aphasia, an incapability or unwillingness to speak, which followed him for a long time through life till the reaction set in in the form of garrulousness, of incapacity to shut one's mouth, of an impulse to speak whatever came into his mind. He felt attracted to the natural sciences, and during the hour when the teacher showed coloured pictures of plants and trees the gloomy class-room seemed to be lighted up; and when the teacher read out of Nilsson's Lectures on Animal Life, he listened and impressed all on his memory. But his father observed that he was backward in his other subjects, especially in Latin. Still, John had to learn Latin and Greek. Why? He was destined for a scholar's career. His father made inquiries into the matter. After hearing from the teacher of Latin that the latter regarded his son as an idiot, his amour propre must have been hurt, for he determined to send his son to a private school, where more practical methods of instruction were employed. Indeed, he was so annoyed that he went so far in private as to praise John's intelligence and to say some severe things regarding his teacher.