The spelling was weak, and the handwriting was very bad.

But, riding, fencing, and boxing were very carefully cultivated, with the result that Tinker, though he lacked the lumps of muscle which disfigured that eminent ancient, might very well have vied in strength and agility with the child Hercules.
In the matter of languages, by dint of spending some of each year in the different European capitals, he learned to speak better French than he did English, for his father enjoyed far better society on the Continent than he did in London.

In the same way, by sojourning in the land, he learned to make himself understood in German; and two months at Rome gave him a fair Italian.

It must be admitted that he was as bad at spelling in all three of those languages as he was in his own.
Again, his geography was hardly of the ornamental kind; he was entirely and happily ignorant of the whereabouts of Leeds and Crim Tartary; it is doubtful whether the Balearic Isles, which most boys of the Western World could point you out on a map, were even a name to him.

But by the time he was ten he could so deal with continental or English Bradshaw that in five or six minutes he could tell you the quickest or the most comfortable way of reaching any town in which a self-respecting person would care to find himself, and his knowledge of steamer-routes and the Great American railways was no less sound.
Besides these accomplishments he was acquiring a wide knowledge of the world.