11
'You mustn't tell us about the ring, here. Very well, then.
Describe your father as a horsebreakerHe doctors sick horses,
I dare say?'
'Oh yesSir.
'Very well, then. He is a veterinary surgeon, a farrier, and
horsebreaker. Give me your definition of a horse.'
(Sissy Jupe thrown into the greatest alarm by this demand.)
'Girl number twenty unable to define a horse!' said Mr. Gradgrind,
for the general behoof of all the little pitchers. 'Girl number
twenty possessed of no facts, in reference to one of the commonest
of animals! Some boy's definition of a horse. Bitzer, yours.'
The square finger, moving here and there, lighted suddenly on Bitzer,
perhaps because he chanced to sit in the same ray of sunlight which,
darting in at one of the bare windows of the intensely whitewashed
room, irradiated Sissy. For, the boys and girls sat on the face of
an inclined plane in two compact bodies, divided up the centre by
a narrow interval; and Sissy, being at the corner of a row on the
sunny side, came in for the beginning of a sunbeam, of which Bitzer,
being at the corner of a row on the other side, a few rows in ad
vance, caught the end. But, whereas the girl was so dark-eyed and
dark-haired, that she seemed to receive a deeper and more lustrous
colour from the sun, when it shone upon her, the boy was so light-
eyed and
