And the boy grew older. Benda personally saw to his education, at least he tried to. For hours each night he taught him the intricacies of arithmetic, spelling, reading. Reading he liked from the start, especially travel stories, but in arithmetic he was a woeful failure.
"Dey's sumpin' wrong with dese numbers," he used to say. "Dey jus' won't add up right."
He couldn't see what good numbers were. Why did people bother with things that were so uninteresting? But best of all he liked his father to take him out in the fields and tell him about everything. The mystery of wheat. Why should so many potatoes grow when you only planted one? Why didn't they grow on trees?
He never tired of asking questions about the land. He was a born farmer and from earliest childhood he always had a small vegetable garden of his own in back of the house. How his little chest used to swell with pride as he harvested his crops and carried them jubilantly to his mother. They were all for her. No wonder he sang as he worked.
