Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: "This, that,' these, those, former, latter—Oh!l?I can never learn them." And my lady Fay tossed her pretty head as if determined not to try; but a glimpse of old Hardknuckle in the distance brought her to her senses, and she quickly bent over her book and began again. She was beautiful, and sweet, and most charmingly dainty; Heaven's blue hid deep in her flashing eyes and the sunshine lay asleep in her hair. She sat upon a rustic bench in a luxuriant bower of roses. The lights and shadows fell bewitchingly upon her thin, white gown, and her tiny feet moved restlessly about upon the velvet-grass carpet as she learned her words. My Lady Fay was sweet sixteen, and would have been the happiest little creature in the world, but for two things. The first was her learning; Hardknuckle, her guardian, had said, "Girls would talk, and they couldn't talk without words, so Lady Fay must learn words." "It would not be so hard to learn words simply," said Lady Fay to herself, "if I were not forced to learn the names of them in bunches; there are nouns, and verbs, and dear me! What is the name of this bunch I am now trying to learn? I must look it up again. Yes, that's it, Pronominal Adjectives. Oh, dear!" she sighed, and she threw her head forward upon her hands, with her elbows resting on her knees. Suddenly a familiar sound came to her ears. "Bang, bang, bang, bang!" She listened attentively, and almost forgot her first trouble, so entirely did her second trouble absorb her. "Bang, bang, bang, bang!" At last she cried out, "Oh, Smashemallup, do stop. I never can learn these words if you keep up that noise." "Bang, bang," came the answer. Smashemallup was Hardknuckle's son; he and Lady Fay had lived at the castle all their lives together, and because he had t...