We learned to draw flying birds and bounding deer and floating swans with scrolls in their beaks, all without lifting pen from paper.

Some of us learned to do it almost as well as the accomplished Mr.Gaskell himself, and almost all of us showed marked improvement in penmanship.

Doubtless Truman Baird did not, he being engrossed with oratory, striving to reproduce, "Hate--the right foot advanced, the face turned to the sky, the gaze directed upward with a fierce expression, the eyes full of a baleful light," or other phases of passion duly set down.

Not for Truman was the ornate full-arm flourish; he had observed that all Congressmen write very badly.
But my namesake may be said to have laid the foundations that winter for an excellent running chirography, under the combined stimuli of Mr.
Gaskell's curves and a hopeless passion for his school-teacher.
As my own teacher had been my own first love, I knew all that he suffered in voiceless longing for his fair one, throned afar in his languishing gaze.

I knew that he plucked flowers meant to be given to her, only to lay them carelessly on the floor beside his seat when school "took in," lacking the courage to bestow them brazenly upon his idol as others did.