I have undertaken to educate that boy of yours, and every day I like the task better, and yet every day I see that I have undertaken something beyond me.

His appetite for knowledge is insatiable, but he is not an intellectual boy; he makes no deductions of his own, but takes mine for granted.

He has no commentary on what he learns, but that of a dissatisfied idealist like me, a man who has been thrown among circumstances sufficiently favourable to make a prime minister out of some men, and yet who has ended by doing nothing.
Another thing: this is my first attempt at education, and I have not the schoolmaster's art to keep him to details.

Every day I make new resolutions, and every day I break them.

The boy turns his great eyes upon me in the middle of some humdrum work, and asks me a question.