We and the World: A Book for Boys. Part I

“He it was who sent the snowflakes
Sifting, hissing through the forest;
Froze the ponds, the lakes, the rivers,
*     *     *     *     *
Shinbegis, the diver, feared not.”
The Song of Hiawatha.

The first day of February was mild, and foggy, and cloudy, and in the night I woke feeling very hot, and threw off my quilt, and heard the dripping of soft rain in the dark outside, and thought, “There goes our skating.” Towards morning, however, I woke again, and had to pull the quilt back into its place, and when I started after breakfast to see what the dam looked like, there was a sharpish frost, which, coming after a day of thaw, had given the ice such a fine smooth surface as we had not had for long.

I felt quite sorry for Jem, because he was going in the dog-cart with my father to see a horse, and as I hadn’t got him to skate with, I went down to the farm after breakfast, to see what Charlie and the Woods were going to do. Charlie was not well, but Mr. Wood said he would come to the dam with me after dinner, as he had to go to the next village on business, and the dam lay in his way.

“Keep to the pond this morning, Jack,” he added, to my astonishment. “Remember it thawed all yesterday; and if the wheel was freed and has been turning, it has run water off from under the ice, and all may not be sound that’s smooth.”

The pond was softer than it looked, but the mill-dam was most tempting. A sheet of “glare ice,” as Americans say, smooth and clear as a newly-washed window-pane. I did not go on it, but I brought Mr. Wood to it early in the afternoon, in the full hope that he would give me leave.

We found several young men on the bank, some fastening their skates and some trying the ice with their heels, and as we stood there the numbers increased, and most of them went on without hesitation; and when they rushed in groups together, I noticed that the ice slightly swayed.

“The ice bends a good deal,” said Mr. Wood to a man standing next to us.

“They say it’s not so like to break when it bends,” was the reply; and the man moved on.

A good many of the elder men from the village had come up, and a group, including John Binder, now stood alongside of us.

“There’s a good sup of water atop of it,” said the mason; and I noticed then that the ice seemed to look wetter, like newly-washed glass still, but like glass that wants wiping dry.

“I’m afraid the ice is not safe,” said the school-master.

“It’s a tidy thickness, sir,” said John Binder, and a heavy man, with his hands in his pockets and his back turned to us, stepped down and gave two or three jumps, and then got up again, and, with his back still turned towards us, said,

“It’s reight enough.”

“It’s right enough for one man, but not for a crowd, I’m afraid. Was the water-wheel freed last night, do you know?”

“It was loosed last night, but it’s froz again,” said a bystander.

“It’s not freezing now,” said the school-master, “and you may see how much larger that weak place where the stream is has got since yesterday. However,” he added, good-humouredly, “I suppose you think you know your own mill-dam and its ways better than I can?”

“Well,” said the heavy man, still with his back to us, “I reckon we’ve slid on this dam a many winters afore you come. No offence, I hope?”

“By no means,” said the school-master; “but if you old hands do begin to feel doubtful as the afternoon goes on, call off those lads at the other end in good time. And if you could warn them not to go in rushes together—but perhaps they would not listen to you,” he added with a spice of malice.

“I don’t suppose they would, sir,” said John Binder, candidly. “They’re very venturesome, is lads.”

“I reckon they’ll suit themselves,” said the heavy man, and he jumped on to the ice, and went off, still with his back to us.

“If I hadn’t lived so many years out of England and out of the world,” said the school-master, turning to me with a half-vexed laugh, “I don’t suppose I should discredit myself to no purpose by telling fools they are in danger. Jack! will you promise me not to go on the dam this afternoon?”

“It is dangerous, is it?” I asked reluctantly; for I wanted sorely to join the rest.

“That’s a matter of opinion, it seems. But I have a wish that you should not go on till I come back. I’ll be as quick as I can. Promise me.”

“I promise,” said I.

“Will you walk with me?” he asked. But I refused. I thought I would rather watch the others; and accordingly, after I had followed the school-master with my eyes as he strode off at a pace that promised soon to bring him back, I put my hands into my pockets and joined the groups of watchers on the bank. I suppose if I had thought about it, I might have observed that though I was dawdling about, my nose and ears and fingers were not nipped. Mr. Wood was right,—it had not been freezing for hours past.

The first thing I looked for was the heavy man. He was so clumsy-looking that I quite expected him to fall when he walked off on to ice only fit for skaters. But as I looked closer I saw that the wet on the top was beginning to have a curdled look, and that the glassiness of the mill-dam was much diminished. The heavy man’s heavy boots got good foothold, and several of his friends, seeing this, went after him. And my promise weighed sorely on me.

The next thing that drew my attention was a lad of about seventeen, who was skating really well. Indeed, everybody was looking at him, for he was the only one of the villagers who could perform in any but the clumsiest fashion, and, with an active interest that hovered between jeering and applause, his neighbours followed him up and down the dam. As I might not go on, I wandered up and down the bank too, and occasionally joined in a murmured cheer when he deftly evaded some intentional blunderer, or cut a figure at the request of his particular friends. I got tired at last, and went down to the pond, where I ploughed about for a time on my skates in solitude, for the pond was empty. Then I ran up to the house to see if Jem had come back, but he had not, and I returned to the dam to wait for the school-master.

The crowd was larger than before, for everybody’s work-hours were over; and the skater was still displaying himself. He was doing very difficult figures now, and I ran round to where the bank was covered with people watching him. In the minute that followed I remember three things with curious distinctness. First, that I saw Mr. Wood coming back, only one field off, and beckoned to him to be quick, because the lad was beginning to cut a double three backwards, and I wanted the school-master to see it. Secondly, that the sight of him seemed suddenly to bring to my mind that we were all on the far side of the dam, the side he thought dangerous. And thirdly, that, quickly as my eyes passed from Mr. Wood to the skater, I caught sight of a bloated-looking young man, whom we all knew as a sort of typical “bad lot,” standing with another man who was a great better, and from a movement between them, it just flashed through my head that they were betting as to whether the lad would cut the double three backwards or not.

He cut one—two—and then he turned too quickly and his skate caught in the softening ice, and when he came headlong, his head struck, and where it struck it went through. It looked so horrible that it was a relief to see him begin to struggle; but the weakened ice broke around him with every effort, and he went down.

For many a year afterwards I used to dream of his face as he sank, and of the way the ice heaved like the breast of some living thing, and fell back, and of the heavy waves that rippled over it out of that awful hole. But great as was the shock, it was small to the storm of shame and agony that came over me when I realized that every comrade who had been around the lad had saved himself by a rush to the bank, where we huddled together, a gaping crowd of foolhardy cowards, without skill to do anything or heart to dare anything to save him.

At that time it maddened me so, that I felt that if I could not help the lad I would rather be drowned in the hole with him, and I began to scramble in a foolish way down the bank, but John Binder caught me by the arm and pulled me back, and said (I suppose to soothe me),

“Yon’s the school-master, sir;” and then I saw Mr. Wood fling himself over the hedge by the alder thicket (he was rather good at high jumps), and come flying along the bank towards us, when he said,

“What’s the matter?”

I threw my arms round him and sobbed, “He was cutting a double three backwards, and he went in.”

Mr. Wood unclasped my arms and turned to the rest.

“What have you done with him?” he said. “Did he hurt himself?”

If the crowd was cowardly and helpless, it was not indifferent; and I shall never forget the haggard faces that turned by one impulse, where a dozen grimy hands pointed—to the hole.

“He’s drowned dead.” “He’s under t’ ice.” “He went right down,” several men hastened to reply, but most of them only enforced the mute explanation of their pointed finger with, “He’s yonder.”

For yet an instant I don’t think Mr. Wood believed it, and then he seized the man next to him (without looking, for he was blind with rage) and said,

“He’s yonder, and you’re here?”

As it happened, it was the man who had talked with his back to us. He was very big and very heavy, but he reeled when Mr. Wood shook him, like a feather caught by a storm.

“You were foolhardy enough an hour ago,” said the school-master. “Won’t one of you venture on to your own dam to help a drowning man?”

“There’s none on us can swim, sir,” said John Binder. “It’s a bad job”—and he gave a sob that made me begin to cry again, and several other people too—“but where’d be t’ use of drowning five or six more atop of him?”

“Can any of you run if you can’t swim?” said the school-master. “Get a stout rope—as fast as you can, and send somebody for the doctor and a bottle of brandy, and a blanket or two to carry him home in. Jack! Hold these.”

I took his watch and his purse, and he went down the bank and walked on to the ice; but after a time his feet went through as the skater’s head had gone.

“It ain’t a bit of use. There’s nought to be done,” said the bystanders: for, except those who had run to do Mr. Wood’s bidding, we were all watching and all huddled closer to the edge than ever. The school-master went down on his hands and knees, on which a big lad, with his hands in his trouser-pockets, guffawed.

“What’s he up to now?” he asked.

“Thee may haud thee tongue if thee can do nought,” said a mill-girl who had come up. “I reckon he knows what he’s efter better nor thee.” She had pushed to the front, and was crouched upon the edge, and seemed very much excited. “God bless him for trying to save t’ best lad in t’ village i’ any fashion, say I! There’s them that’s nearer kin to him and not so kind.”

Perhaps the strict justice of this taunt prevented a reply (for there lurks some fairness in the roughest of us), or perhaps the crowd, being chiefly men knew from experience that there are occasions when it is best to let a woman say her say.

“Ye see he’s trying to spread hisself out,” John Binder explained in pacific tones. “I reckon he thinks it’ll bear him if he shifts half of his weight on to his hands.”

The girl got nearer to the mason, and looked up at him with her eyes full of tears.

“Thank ye, John,” she said. “D’ye think he’ll get him out?”

“Maybe he will, my lass. He’s a man that knows what he’s doing. I’ll say so much for him.”

“Nay!” added the mason sorrowfully. “Th’ ice’ll never hold him—his hand’s in—and there goes his knee. Maester! maester!” he shouted, “come off! come off!” and many a voice besides mine echoed him, “Come off! come off!”

The girl got John Binder by the arm, and said hoarsely, “Fetch him off! He’s a reight good ’un—over good to be drownded, if—if it’s of no use.” And she sat down on the bank, and pulled her mill-shawl over her head, and cried as I had never seen any one cry before.

I was so busy watching her that I did not see that Mr. Wood had got back to the bank. Several hands were held out to help him, but he shook his head and said—“Got a knife?”

Two or three jack-knives were out in an instant. He pointed to the alder thicket. “I want two poles,” he said, “sixteen feet long, if you can, and as thick as my wrist at the bottom.”

“All right, sir.”

He sat down on the bank, and I rushed up and took one of his cold wet hands in both mine, and said, “Please, please, don’t go on any more.”

“He must be dead ever so long ago,” I added, repeating what I had heard.

“He hasn’t been in the water ten minutes,” said the school-master, laughing, “Jack! Jack! you’re not half ready for travelling yet. You must learn not to lose your head and your heart and your wits and your sense of time in this fashion, if you mean to be any good at a pinch to yourself or your neighbours. Has the rope come?”

“No, sir.”

“Those poles?” said the school-master, getting up.

“They’re here!” I shouted, as a young forest of poles came towards us, so willing had been the owners of the jack-knives. The thickest had been cut by the heavy man, and Mr. Wood took it first.

“Thank you, friend,” he said. The man didn’t speak, and he turned his back as usual, but he gave a sideways surly nod before he turned. The school-master chose a second pole, and then pushed both before him right out on to the ice, in such a way that with the points touching each other they formed a sort of huge A, the thicker ends being the nearer to the bank.

“Now, Jack,” said he, “pay attention; and no more blubbering. There’s always plenty of time for giving way afterwards.”

As he spoke he scrambled on to the poles, and began to work himself and them over the ice, wriggling in a kind of snake fashion in the direction of the hole. We watched him breathlessly, but within ten yards of the hole he stopped. He evidently dared not go on; and the same thought seized all of us—“Can he get back?” Spreading his legs and arms he now lay flat upon the poles, peering towards the hole as if to try if he could see anything of the drowning man. It was only for an instant, then he rolled over on to the rotten ice, smashed through, and sank more suddenly than the skater had done.

The mill-girl jumped up with a wild cry and rushed to the water, but John Binder pulled her back as he had pulled me. Martha, our housemaid, said afterwards (and was ready to take oath on the gilt-edged Church service my mother gave her) that the girl was so violent that it took fourteen men to hold her; but Martha wasn’t there, and I only saw two, one at each arm, and when she fainted they laid her down and left her, and hurried back to see what was going on. For tenderness is an acquired grace in men, and it was not common in our neighbourhood.

What was going on was that John Binder had torn his hat from his head and was saying, “I don’t know if there’s aught we can do, but I can’t go home myself and leave him yonder. I’m a married man with a family, but I don’t vally my life if——”

But the rest of this speech was drowned in noise more eloquent than words, and then it broke into cries of “See thee!—It is—it’s t’ maester! and he has—no!—yea!—he has—he’s gotten him. Polly, lass! he’s fetched up thy Arthur by t’ hair of his heead.”

It was strictly true. The school-master told me afterwards how it was. When he found that the ice would bear no longer, he rolled into the water on purpose, but, to his horror, he felt himself seized by the drowning man, which pulled him suddenly down. The lad had risen once, it seems, though we had not seen him, and had got a breath of air at the hole, but the edge broke in his numbed fingers, and he sank again and drifted under the ice. When he rose the second time, by an odd chance it was just where Mr. Wood broke in, and his clutch of the school-master nearly cost both their lives.

“If ever,” said Mr. Wood, when he was talking about it afterwards, “if ever, Jack, when you’re out in the world you get under water, and somebody tries to save you, when he grips you, don’t seize him, if you can muster self-control to avoid it. If you cling to him, you’ll either drown both, or you’ll force him to do as I did—throttle you, to keep you quiet.”

“Did you?” I gasped.

“Of course I did. I got him by the throat and dived with him—the only real risk I ran, as I did not know how deep the dam was.”

“It’s an old quarry,” said I.

“I know now. We went down well, and I squeezed his throat as we went. As soon as he was still we naturally rose, and I turned on my back and got him by the head. I looked about for the hole, and saw it glimmering above me like a moon in a fog, and then up we came.”

When they did come up, our joy was so great that for the moment we felt as if all was accomplished; but far the hardest part really was to come. When the school-master clutched the poles once more, and drove one under the lad’s arms and under his own left arm, and so kept his burden afloat whilst he broke a swimming path for himself with the other, our admiration of his cleverness gave place to the blessed thought that it might now be possible to help him. The sight of the poles seemed suddenly to suggest it, and in a moment every spare pole had been seized, and, headed by our heavy friend, eight or ten men plunged in, and, smashing the ice before them, waded out to meet the school-master. On the bank we were dead silent; in the water they neither stopped nor spoke till it was breast high round their leader.

I have often thought, and have always felt quite sure, that if the heavy man had gone on till the little grey waves and the bits of ice closed over him, not a soul of those who followed him would—nay, could—have turned back. Heroism, like cowardice, is contagious, and I do not think there was one of us by that time who would have feared to dare or grudged to die.

As it was, the heavy man stood still and shouted for the rope. It had come, and perhaps it was not the smallest effect of the day’s teaching, that those on the bank paid it out at once to those in the water till it reached the leader, without waiting to ask why he wanted it. The grace of obedience is slow to be learnt by disputatious northmen, but we had had some hard teaching that afternoon.

When the heavy man got the rope he tied the middle part of it round himself, and, coiling the shorter end, he sent it, as if it had been a quoit, skimming over the ice towards the school-master. As it unwound itself it slid along, and after a struggle Mr. Wood grasped it. I fancy he fastened it round the lad’s body; and got his own hands freer to break the ice before them. Then the heavy man turned, and the long end of the line, passing from hand to hand in the water, was seized upon the bank by every one who could get hold of it. I never was more squeezed and buffeted in my life; but we fairly fought for the privilege of touching if it were but a strand of the rope that dragged them in.

And a flock of wild birds, resting on their journey at the other end of the mill-dam, rose in terror and pursued their seaward way; so wild and so prolonged were the echoes of that strange, speechless cry in which collective man gives vent to overpowering emotion.

It is odd, when one comes to think of it, but I know it is true, for two sensible words would have stuck in my own throat and choked me, but I cheered till I could cheer no longer.

“In doubtful matters Courage may do much:—In desperate—Patience.”—Old Proverb.

The young skater duly recovered, and thenceforward Mr. Wood’s popularity in the village was established, and the following summer he started a swimming-class, to which the young men flocked with more readiness than they commonly showed for efforts made to improve them.

For my own part I had so realized, to my shame, that one may feel very adventurous and yet not know how to venture or what to venture in the time of need, that my whole heart was set upon getting the school-master to teach me to swim and to dive, with any other lessons in preparedness of body and mind which I was old enough to profit by. And if the true tales of his own experiences were more interesting than the Penny Numbers, it was better still to feel that one was qualifying in one’s own proper person for a life of adventure.

During the winter Mr. Wood built a boat, which was christened the Adela, after his wife. It was an interesting process to us all. I hung about and did my best to be helpful, and both Jem and I spoiled our everyday trousers, and rubbed the boat’s sides, the day she was painted. It was from the Adela that Jem and I had our first swimming-lessons, Mr. Wood lowering us with a rope under our arms, by which he gave us as much support as was needed, whilst he taught us how to strike out.

We had swimming-races on the canal, and having learned to swim and dive without our clothes, we learnt to do so in them, and found it much more difficult for swimming and easier for diving. It was then that the trousers we had damaged when the Adela was built came in most usefully, and saved us from having to attempt the at least equally difficult task of persuading my mother to let us spoil good ones in an amusement which had the unpardonable quality of being “very odd.”

Dear old Charlie had as much fun out of the boat as we had, though he could not learn to dive. He used to look as if every minute of a pull up the canal on a sunny evening gave him pleasure; and the brown Irish spaniel Jem gave him used to swim after the boat and look up in Charlie’s face as if it knew how he enjoyed it. And later on, Mr. Wood taught Bob Furniss to row and Charlie to steer; so that Charlie could sometimes go out and feel quite free to stop the boat when and where he liked. That was after he started so many collections of insects and water-weeds, and shells, and things you can only see under a microscope. Bob and he used to take all kinds of pots and pans and nets and dippers with them, so that Charlie could fish up what he wanted, and keep things separate. He was obliged to keep the live things he got for his fresh-water aquarium in different jam-pots, because he could never be sure which would eat up which till he knew them better, and the water-scorpions and the dragon-fly larvæ ate everything. Bob Furniss did not mind pulling in among the reeds and waiting as long as you wanted. Mr. Wood sometimes wanted to get back to his work, but Bob never wanted to get back to his. And he was very good-natured about getting into the water and wading and grubbing for things; indeed, I think he got to like it.

At first Mr. Wood had been rather afraid of trusting Charlie with him. He thought Bob might play tricks with the boat, even though he knew how to manage her, when there was only one helpless boy with him. But Mrs. Furniss said, “Nay! Our Bob’s a bad ’un, but he’s not one of that sort, he’ll not plague them that’s afflicted.” And she was quite right; for though his father said he could be trusted with nothing else, we found he could be trusted with Cripple Charlie.

It was two days before the summer holidays came to an end that Charlie asked me to come down to the farm and help him to put away his fern collection and a lot of other things into the places that he had arranged for them in his room; for now that the school-room was wanted again, he could not leave his papers and boxes about there. Charlie lived at the farm altogether now. He was better there than on the moors, so he boarded there and went home for visits. The room Mrs. Wood had given him was the one where the old miser had slept. In a memorandum left with his will it appeared that he had expressed a wish that the furniture of that room should not be altered, which was how they knew it was his. So Mrs. Wood had kept the curious old oak bed (the back of which was fastened into the wall), and an old oak press, with a great number of drawers with brass handles to them, and all the queer furniture that she found there, just as it was. Even the brass warming-pan was only rubbed and put back in its place, and the big bellows were duly hung up by the small fire-place. But everything was so polished up and cleaned, the walls re-papered with a soft grey-green paper spangled with dog-daisies, and the room so brightened up with fresh blinds and bedclothes, and a bit of bright carpet, that it did not look in the least dismal, and Charlie was very proud and very fond of it. It had two windows, one where the beehive was, and one very sunny one, where he had a balm of Gilead that Isaac’s wife gave him, and his old medicine-bottles full of cuttings on the upper ledge. The old women used to send him “slippings” off their fairy roses and myrtles and fuchsias, and they rooted very well in that window, there was so much sun.

Charlie had only just begun a fern collection, and I had saved my pocket-money (I did not want it for anything else) and had bought him several quires of cartridge-paper; and Dr. Brown had given him a packet of medicine-labels to cut up into strips to fasten his specimens in with, and the collection looked very well and very scientific; and all that remained was to find a good place to put it away in. The drawers of the press were of all shapes and sizes, but there were two longish very shallow ones that just matched each other, and when I pulled one of them out, and put the fern-papers in, they fitted exactly, and the drawer just held half the collection. I called Charlie to look, and he hobbled up on his crutches and was delighted, but he said he should like to put the others in himself, so I got him into a chair, and shut up the full drawer and pulled out the empty one, and went down-stairs for the two moleskins we were curing, and the glue-pot, and the toffy-tin, and some other things that had to be cleared out of the school-room now the holidays were over.

When I came back the fern-papers were still outside, and Charlie was looking flushed and cross.

“I don’t know how you managed,” he said, “but I can’t get them in. This drawer must be shorter than the other; it doesn’t go nearly so far back.”

“Oh yes, it does, Charlie!” I insisted, for I felt as certain as people always do feel about little details of that kind. “The drawers are exactly alike; you can’t have got the fern-sheets quite flush with each other,” and I began to arrange the trayful of things I had brought up-stairs in the bottom of the cupboard.

“I know it’s the drawer,” I heard Charlie say. (“He’s as obstinate as possible,” thought I.)

Then I heard him banging at the wood with his fists and his crutch. (“He is in a temper!” was my mental comment.) After this my attention was distracted for a second or two by seeing what I thought was a bit of toffy left in the tin, and biting it and finding it was a piece of sheet-glue. I had not spit out all the disgust of it, when Charlie called me in low, awe-struck tones: “Jack! come here. Quick!”

I ran to him. The drawer was open, but it seemed to have another drawer inside it, a long, narrow, shallow one.

“I hit the back, and this sprang out,” said Charlie. “It’s a secret drawer—and look!”

I did look. The secret drawer was closely packed with rolls of thin leaflets, which we were old enough to recognize as bank-notes, and with little bags of wash-leather; and when Charlie opened the little bags they were filled with gold.

There was a paper with the money, written by the old miser, to say that it was a codicil to his will, and that the money was all for Mrs. Wood. Why he had not left it to her in the will itself seemed very puzzling, but his lawyer (whom the Woods consulted about it) said that he always did things in a very eccentric way, but generally for some sort of reason, even if it were rather a freaky one, and that perhaps he thought that the relations would be less spiteful at first if they did not know about the money, and that Mrs. Wood would soon find it, if she used and valued his old press.

I don’t quite know whether there was any fuss with the relations about this part of the bequest, but I suppose the lawyer managed it all right, for the Woods got the money and gave up the school. But they kept the old house, and bought some more land, and Walnut-tree Academy became Walnut-tree Farm once more. And Cripple Charlie lived on with them, and he was so happy, it really seemed as if my dear mother was right when she said to my father, “I am so pleased, my dear, for that poor boy’s sake, I can hardly help crying. He’s got two homes and two fathers and mothers, where many a young man has none, as if to make good his affliction to him.”

It puzzles me, even now, to think how my father could have sent Jem and me to Crayshaw’s school. (Nobody ever called him Mr. Crayshaw except the parents of pupils who lived at a distance. In the neighbourhood he and his whole establishment were lumped under the one word Crayshaw’s, and as a farmer hard by once said to me, “Crayshaw’s is universally disrespected.”)

I do not think it was merely because “Crayshaw’s” was cheap that we were sent there, though my father had so few reasons to give for his choice that he quoted that among them. A man with whom he had had business dealings (which gave him much satisfaction for some years, and more dissatisfaction afterwards) did really, I think, persuade my father to send us to this school, one evening when they were dining together.

Few things are harder to guess at than the grounds on which an Englishman of my father’s type “makes up his mind”; and yet the question is an important one, for an idea once lodged in his head, a conviction once as much his own as the family acres, and you will as soon part him from the one as from the other. I have known little matters of domestic improvements, in which my mother’s comfort was concerned and her experience conclusive, for which he grudged a few shillings, and was absolutely impenetrable by her persuasions and representations. And I have known him waste pounds on things of the most curious variety, foisted on him by advertising agents without knowledge, trial, or rational ground of confidence. I suppose that persistency, a glibber tongue than he himself possessed, a mass of printed rubbish which always looks imposing to the unliterary, that primitive combination of authoritativeness and hospitality which makes some men as ready to say Yes to a stranger as they are to say No at home, and perhaps some lack of moral courage, may account for it. I can clearly remember how quaintly sheepish my father used to look after committing some such folly, and how, after the first irrepressible fall of countenance, my mother would have defended him against anybody else’s opinion, let alone her own. Young as I was I could feel that, and had a pretty accurate estimate of the value of the moral lecture on faith in one’s fellow-creatures, which was an unfailing outward sign of my father’s inward conviction that he had been taken in by a rogue. I knew too, well enough, that my mother’s hasty and earnest Amen to this discourse was an equally reliable token of her knowledge that my father sorely needed defending, and some instinct made me aware also that my father knew that this was so. That he knew that it was that tender generosity towards one’s beloved, in which so many of her sex so far exceeds ours, and not an intellectual conviction of his wisdom, which made her support what he had done, and that feeling this he felt dissatisfied, and snapped at her accordingly.

The dislike my dear mother took to the notion of our going to Crayshaw’s only set seals to our fate, and the manner of her protests was not more fortunate than the matter. She was timid and vacillating from wifely habit, whilst motherly anxiety goaded her to be persistent and almost irritable on the subject. Habitually regarding her own wishes and views as worthless, she quoted the Woods at every turn of her arguments, which was a mistake, for my father was sufficiently like the rest of his neighbours not to cotton very warmly to people whose tastes, experiences, and lines of thought were so much out of the common as those of the ex-convict and his wife. Moreover, he had made up his mind, and when one has done that, he is proof against seventy men who can render a reason.

To rumours which accused “Crayshaw’s” of undue severity, of discomfort, of bad teaching and worse manners, my father opposed arguments which he allowed were “old-fashioned” and which were far-fetched from the days of our great-grandfather.

A strict school-master was a good school-master, and if more parents were as wise as Solomon on the subject of the rod, Old England would not be discredited by such a namby-pamby race as young men of the present day seemed by all accounts to be. It was high time the boys did rough it a bit; would my mother have them always tied to her apron-strings? Great Britain would soon be Little Britain if boys were to be brought up like young ladies. As to teaching, it was the fashion to make a fuss about it, and a pretty pass learning brought some folks to, to judge by the papers and all one heard. His own grandfather lived to ninety-seven, and died sitting in his chair, in a bottle-green coat and buff breeches. He wore a pig-tail to the day of his death, and never would be contradicted by anybody. He had often told my father that at the school he went to, the master signed the receipts for his money with a cross, but the usher was a bit of a scholar, and the boys had cream to their porridge on Sundays. And the old gentleman managed his own affairs to ninety-seven, and threw the doctor’s medicine-bottles out of the window then. He died without a doubt on his mind or a debt on his books, and my father (taking a pinch out of Great-Grandfather’s snuff-box) hoped Jem and I might do as well.

In short, we were sent to “Crayshaw’s.”

It was not a happy period of my life. It was not a good or wholesome period; and I am not fond of recalling it. The time came when I shrank from telling Charlie everything, almost as if he had been a girl. His life was lived in such a different atmosphere, under such different conditions. I could not trouble him, and I did not believe he could make allowances for me. But on our first arrival I wrote him a long letter (Jem never wrote letters), and the other day he showed it to me. It was a first impression, but a sufficiently vivid and truthful one, so I give it here.

“Crayshaw’s (for that’s what they call it here, and a beastly hole it is).

“Monday.

“My dear old Charlie,—We came earlier than was settled, for Father got impatient and there was nothing to stop us, but I don’t think old Crayshaw liked our coming so soon. You never saw such a place, it’s so dreary. A boy showed us straight into the school-room. There are three rows of double desks running down the room and disgustingly dirty, I don’t know what Mrs. Wood would say, and old Crayshaw’s desk is in front of the fire, so that he can see all the boys sideways, and it just stops any heat coming to them. And there he was, and I don’t think Father liked the look of him particularly, you never saw an uglier. Such a flaming face and red eyes like Bob Furniss’s ferret and great big whiskers; but I’ll make you a picture of him, at least I’ll make two pictures, for Lewis Lorraine says he’s got no beard on Sundays, and rather a good one on Saturdays. Lorraine is a very rum fellow, but I like him. It was he showed us in, and he did catch it afterwards, but he only makes fun of it. Old Crayshaw’s desk had got a lot of canes on one side of it and a most beastly dirty snuffy red and green handkerchief on the other, and an ink-pot in the middle. He made up to Father like anything and told such thumpers. He said there were six boys in one room, but really there’s twelve. Jem and I sleep together. There’s nothing to wash in and no prayers. If you say them you get boots at your head, and one hit Jem behind the ear, so I pulled his sleeve and said, ‘Get up, you can say them in bed,’ But you know Jem, and he said, ’Wait till I’ve done, God bless Father and Mother,’ and when he had, he went in and fought, and I backed him up, and them old Crayshaw found us, and oh, how he did beat us!

“——Wednesday. Old Snuffy is a regular brute, and I don’t care if he finds this and sees what I say. But he won’t, for the milkman is taking it. He always does if you can pay him. But I’ve put most of my money into the bank. Three of the top boys have a bank, and we all have to deposit, only I kept fourpence in one of my boots. They give us bank-notes for a penny and a halfpenny; they make them themselves. The sweet-shop takes them. They only give you eleven penny notes for a shilling in the bank, or else it would burst. At dinner we have a lot of pudding to begin with, and it’s very heavy. You can hardly eat anything afterwards. The first day Lorraine said quite out loud and very polite, ‘Did you say duff before meat, young gentlemen?’ and I couldn’t help laughing, and old Snuffy beat his head horridly with his dirty fists. But Lorraine minds nothing; he says he knows old Snuffy will kill him some day, but he says he doesn’t want to live, for his father and mother are dead; he only wants to catch old Snuffy in three more booby-traps before he dies. He’s caught him in four already. You see, when old Snuffy is cat-walking he wears goloshes that he may sneak about better, and the way Lorraine makes booby-traps is by balancing cans of water on the door when it’s ajar, so that he gets doused, and the can falls on his head, and strings across the bottom of the door, not far from the ground, so that he catches his goloshes and comes down. The other fellows say that old Crayshaw had a lot of money given him in trust for Lorraine, and he’s spent it all, and Lorraine has no one to stick up for him, and that’s why Crayshaw hates him.

“——Saturday. I could not catch the milkman, and now I’ve got your letter, though Snuffy read it first. Jem and I cry dreadful in bed. That’s the comfort of being together. I’ll try and be as good as I can, but you don’t know what this place is. It’s very different to the farm. Do you remember the row about that book Horace Simpson got? I wish you could see the books the boys have here. At least I don’t wish it, for I wish I didn’t look at them, the milkman brings them; he always will if you can pay him. When I saw old Snuffy find one in Smith’s desk, I expected he would half kill him, but he didn’t do much to him, he only took the book away; and Lorraine says he never does beat them much for that, because he doesn’t want them to leave off buying them, because he wants them himself. Don’t tell the Woods this. Don’t tell Mother Jem and I cry, or else she’ll be miserable. I don’t so much mind the beatings (Lorraine says you get hard in time), nor the washing at the sink—nor the duff puddings—but it is such a beastly hole, and he is such an old brute, and I feel so dreadful I can’t tell you. Give my love to Mrs. Wood and to Mr. Wood, and to Carlo and to Mary Anne, and to your dear dear self, and to Isaac when you see him.

“And I am your affectionate friend,
“Jack.

“P.S. Jem sends his best love, and he’s got two black eyes.

“P.S. No. 2. You would be sorry for Lorraine if you knew him. Sometimes I’m afraid he’ll kill himself, for he says there’s really nothing in the Bible about suicide. So I said—killing yourself is as bad as killing anybody else. So he said—is stealing from yourself as bad as stealing from anybody else? And we had a regular argue. Some of the boys argle-bargle on Sundays, he says, but most of them fight. When they differ, they put tin-tacks with the heads downwards on each other’s places on the forms in school, and if they run into you and you scream, old Snuffy beats you. The milkman brings them, by the half-ounce, with very sharp points, if you can pay him. Most of the boys are a horrid lot, and so dirty. Lorraine is as dirty as the rest, and I asked him why, and he said it was because he’d thrown up the sponge; but he got rather red, and he’s washed himself cleaner this morning. He says he has an uncle in India, and some time ago he wrote to him, and told him about Crayshaw’s, and gave the milkman a diamond pin, that had been his father’s, and Snuffy didn’t know about, to post it with plenty of stamps, but he thinks he can’t have put plenty on, for no answer ever came. I’ve told him I’ll post another one for him in the holidays. Don’t say anything about this back in your letters. He reads ’em all.

“——Monday. I’ve caught the milkman at last, he’ll take it this evening. The lessons here are regular rubbish. I’m so glad I’ve a good knife, for if you have you can dig holes in your desk to put collections in. The boy next to me has earwigs, but you have to keep a look-out, or he puts them in your ears. I turned up a stone near the sink this morning, and got five wood-lice for mine. It’s considered a very good collection.”

“But none inquired how Peter used the rope,
Or what the bruise that made the stripling stoop;
None could the ridges on his back behold,
None sought him shiv’ring in the winter’s cold.
*     *     *     *     *
The pitying women raised a clamour round.”
Crabbe, The Borough.

A great many people say that all suffering is good for one, and I am sure pain does improve one very often, and in many ways. It teaches one sympathy, it softens and it strengthens. But I cannot help thinking that there are some evil experiences which only harden and stain. The best I can say for what we endured at Crayshaw’s is that it was experience, and so I suppose could not fail to teach one something, which, as Jem says, was “more than Snuffy did.”

The affection with which I have heard men speak of their school-days and school-masters makes me know that Mr. Crayshaw was not a common type of pedagogue. He was not a common type of man, happily; but I have met other specimens in other parts of the world in which his leading quality was as fully developed, though their lives had nothing in common with his except the opportunities of irresponsible power.

The old wounds are scars now, it is long past and over, and I am grown up, and have roughed it in the world; but I say quite deliberately that I believe that Mr. Crayshaw was not merely a harsh man, uncultured and inconsiderate, having need and greed of money, taking pupils cheap, teaching them little or nothing, and keeping a kind of rough order with too much flogging,—but that the mischief of him was that he was possessed by a passion (not the less fierce because it was unnatural) which grew with indulgence and opportunity, as other passions grow, and that this was a passion for cruelty.

One does not rough it long in this wicked world without seeing more cruelty both towards human beings and towards animals than one cares to think about; but a large proportion of common cruelty comes of ignorance, bad tradition and uncultured sympathies. Some painful outbreaks of inhumanity, where one would least expect it, are no doubt strictly to be accounted for by disease. But over and above these common and these exceptional instances, one cannot escape the conviction that irresponsible power is opportunity in all hands and a direct temptation in some to cruelty, and that it affords horrible development to those morbid cases in which cruelty becomes a passion.

That there should ever come a thirst for blood in men as well as tigers, is bad enough but conceivable when linked with deadly struggle, or at the wild dictates of revenge. But a lust for cruelty growing fiercer by secret and unchecked indulgence, a hideous pleasure in seeing and inflicting pain, seems so inhuman a passion that we shrink from acknowledging that this is ever so.

And if it belonged to the past alone, to barbarous despotisms or to savage life, one might wisely forget it; for the dark pages of human history are unwholesome as well as unpleasant reading, unless the mind be very sane in a body very sound. But those in whose hands lie the destinies of the young and of the beasts who serve and love us, of the weak, the friendless, the sick and the insane, have not, alas! this excuse for ignoring the black records of man’s abuse of power!

The records of its abuse in the savage who loads women’s slender shoulders with his burdens, leaves his sick to the wayside jackal, and knocks his aged father on the head when he is past work; the brutality of slave-drivers, the iniquities of vice-maddened Eastern despots;—such things those who never have to deal with them may afford to forget.

But men who act for those who have no natural protectors, or have lost the power of protecting themselves, who legislate for those who have no voice in the making of laws, and for the brute creation, which we win to our love and domesticate for our convenience; who apprentice pauper boys and girls, who meddle with the matters of weak women, sick persons, and young children, are bound to face a far sadder issue. That even in these days, when human love again and again proves itself not only stronger than death, but stronger than all the selfish hopes of life; when the everyday manners of everyday men are concessions of courtesy to those who have not the strength to claim it; when children and pet animals are spoiled to grotesqueness; when the good deeds of priest and physician, nurse and teacher, surpass all earthly record of them—man, as man, is no more to be trusted with unchecked power than hitherto.

The secret histories of households, where power should be safest in the hands of love; of hospitals, of schools, of orphanages, of poorhouses, of lunatic-asylums, of religious communities founded for God’s worship and man’s pity, of institutions which assume the sacred title as well as the responsibilities of Home—from the single guardian of some rural idiot to the great society which bears the blessed Name of Jesus—have not each and all their dark stories, their hushed-up scandals, to prove how dire is the need of public opinion without, and of righteous care within, that what is well begun should be well continued?

If any one doubts this, let him pause on each instance, one by one, and think of what he has seen, and heard, and read, and known of; and he will surely come to the conviction that human nature cannot, even in the very service of charity, be safely trusted with the secret exercise of irresponsible power, and that no light can be too fierce to beat upon and purify every spot where the weak are committed to the tender mercies of the consciences of the strong.

Mr. Crayshaw’s conscience was not a tender one, and very little light came into his out-of-the-way establishment, and no check whatever upon his cruelty. It had various effects on the different boys. It killed one in my day, and the doctor (who had been “in a difficulty” some years back, over a matter through which Mr. Crayshaw helped him with bail and testimony) certified to heart disease, and we all had our pocket-handkerchiefs washed, and went to the funeral. And Snuffy had cards printed with a black edge, and several angels and a broken lily, and the hymn—

“Death has been here and borne away
A brother from our side;
Just in the morning of his day,
As young as we he died.”

—and sent them to all the parents. But the pupils had to pay for the stamps. And my dear mother cried dreadfully, first because she was so sorry for the boy, and secondly because she ever had felt uncharitably towards Mr. Crayshaw.

Crayshaw’s cruelty crushed others, it made liars and sneaks of boys naturally honest, and it produced in Lorraine an unchildlike despair that was almost grand, so far was the spirit above the flesh in him. But I think its commonest and strangest result was to make the boys bully each other.

One of the least cruel of the tyrannies the big boys put upon the little ones, sometimes bore very hardly on those who were not strong. They used to ride races on our backs and have desperate mounted battles and tournaments. In many a playground and home since then I have seen boys tilt and race, and steeplechase, with smaller boys upon their backs, and plenty of wholesome rough-and-tumble in the game; and it has given me a twinge of heartache to think how, even when we were at play, Crayshaw’s baneful spirit cursed us with its example, so that the big and strong could not be happy except at the expense of the little and weak.

For it was the big ones who rode the little ones, with neatly-cut ash-sticks and clumsy spurs. I can see them now, with the thin legs of the small boys tottering under them, like a young donkey overridden by a coal-heaver.

I was a favourite horse, for I was active and nimble, and (which was more to the point) well made. It was the shambling, ill-proportioned lads who suffered most. The biggest boy in school rode me, as a rule, but he was not at all a bad bully, so I was lucky. He never spurred me, and he boasted of my willingness and good paces. I am sure he did not know, I don’t suppose he ever stopped to think, how bad it was for me, or what an aching lump of prostration I felt when it was over. The day I fainted after winning a steeplechase, he turned a bucket of cold water over me, and as this roused me into a tingling vitality of pain, he was quite proud of his treatment, and told me nothing brought a really good horse round after a hard day like a bucket of clean water. And (so much are we the creatures of our conditions!) I remember feeling something approaching to satisfaction at the reflection that I had “gone till I dropped,” and had been brought round after the manner of the best-conducted stables.

It was not that that made Jem and me run away. (For we did run away.) Overstrain and collapse, ill-usage short of torture, hard living and short commons, one got a certain accustomedness to, according to the merciful law which within certain limits makes a second nature for us out of use and wont. The one pain that knew no pause, and allowed of no revival, the evil that overbore us, mind and body, was the evil of constant dread. Upon us little boys fear lay always, and the terror of it was that it was uncertain. What would come next, and from whom, we never knew.

It was I who settled we should run away. I did it the night that Jem gave in, and would do nothing but cry noiselessly into his sleeve and wish he was dead. So I settled it and told Lorraine. I wanted him to come too, but he would not. He pretended that he did not care, and he said he had nowhere to go to. But he got into Snuffy’s very own room at daybreak whilst we stood outside and heard him snoring; and very loud he must have snored too, for I could hear my heart thumping so I should not have thought I could have heard anything else. And Lorraine took the back-door key off the drawers, and let us out, and took it back again. He feared nothing. There was a walnut-tree by the gate, and Jem said, “Suppose we do our faces like gipsies, so that nobody may know us.” (For Jem was terribly frightened of being taken back.) So we found some old bits of peel and rubbed our cheeks, but we dared not linger long over it, and I said, “We’d better get further on, and we can hide if we hear steps or wheels.” So we took each other’s hands, and for nearly a mile we ran as hard as we could go, looking back now and then over our shoulders, like the picture of Christian and Hopeful running away from the Castle of Giant Despair.

We were particularly afraid of the milkman, for milkmen drive about early, and he had taken a runaway boy back to Crayshaw’s years before, and Snuffy gave him five shillings. They said he once helped another boy to get away, but it was a big one, who gave him his gold watch. He would do anything if you paid him. Jem and I had each a little bundle in a handkerchief, but nothing in them that the milkman would have cared for. We managed very well, for we got behind a wall when he went by, and I felt so much cheered up I thought we should get home that day, far as it was. But when we got back into the road, I found that Jem was limping, for Snuffy had stamped on his foot when Jem had had it stuck out beyond the desk, when he was writing; and the running had made it worse, and at last he sat down by the roadside, and said I was to go on home and send back for him. It was not very likely I would leave him to the chance of being pursued by Mr. Crayshaw; but there he sat, and I thought I never should have persuaded him to get on my back, for good-natured as he is, Jem is as obstinate as a pig. But I said, “What’s the use of my having been first horse with the heaviest weight in school, if I can’t carry you?” So he got up and I carried him a long way, and then a cart overtook us, and we got a lift home. And they knew us quite well, which shows how little use walnut-juice is, and it is disgusting to get off.

I think, as it happened, it was very unfortunate that we had discoloured our faces; for though my mother was horrified at our being so thin and pinched-looking, my father said that of course we looked frights with brown daubs all over our cheeks and necks. But then he never did notice people looking ill. He was very angry indeed, at first, about our running away, and would not listen to what we said. He was angry too with my dear mother, because she believed us, and called Snuffy a bad man and a brute. And he ordered the dog-cart to be brought round, and said that Martha was to give us some breakfast, and that we might be thankful to get that instead of a flogging, for that when he ran away from school to escape a thrashing, his father gave him one thrashing while the dog-cart was being brought round, and drove him straight back to school, where the school-master gave him another.

“And a very good thing for me,” said my father, buttoning his coat, whilst my mother and Martha went about crying, and Jem and I stood silent. If we were to go back, the more we told, the worse would be Snuffy’s revenge. An unpleasant hardness was beginning to creep over me. “The next time I run away,” was my thought, “I shall not run home.” But with this came a rush of regret for Jem’s sake. I knew that Crayshaw’s, did more harm to him than to me, and almost involuntarily I put my arms round him, thinking that if they would only let him stay, I could go back and bear anything, like Lewis Lorraine. Jem had been crying, and when he hid his face on my shoulder, and leaned against me, I thought it was for comfort, but he got heavier and heavier, till I called out, and he rolled from my arms and was caught in my father’s. He had been standing about on the bad foot, and pain and weariness and hunger and fright overpowered him, and he had fainted.

The dog-cart was counter-ordered, and Jem was put to bed, and Martha served me a breakfast that would have served six full-grown men. I ate far more than satisfied me, but far less than satisfied Martha, who seemed to hope that cold fowl and boiled eggs, fried bacon and pickled beef, plain cakes and currant cakes, jam and marmalade, buttered toast, strong tea and unlimited sugar and yellow cream, would atone for the past in proportion to the amount I ate, if it did not fatten me under her eyes. I really think I spent the rest of the day in stupor. I am sure it was not till the following morning that I learned the decision to which my father had come about us.

Jem was too obviously ill to be anywhere at present but at home; and my father decided that he would not send him back to Crayshaw’s at all, but to a much more expensive school in the south of England, to which the parson of our parish was sending one of his sons. I was to return to Crayshaw’s at once; he could not afford the expensive school for us both, and Jem was the eldest. Besides which, he was not going to countenance rebellion in any school to which he sent his sons, or to insult a man so highly recommended to him as Mr. Crayshaw had been. There certainly seemed to have been some severity, and the boys seemed to be a very rough lot; but Jem would fight, and if he gave he must take. His great-grandfather was just the same, and he fought the Putney Pet when he was five-and-twenty, and his parents thought he was sitting quietly at his desk in Fetter Lane.

I loved Jem too well to be jealous of him, but I was not the less conscious of the tender tone in which my father always spoke even of his faults, and of the way it stiffened and cooled when he added that I was not so ready with my fists, but that I was as fond of my own way as Jem was of a fight; but that setting up for being unlike other people didn’t do for school life, and that the Woods had done me no kindness by making a fool of me. He added, however, that he should request Mr. Crayshaw, as a personal favour, that I should receive no punishment for running away, as I had suffered sufficiently already.

We had told very little of the true history of Crayshaw’s before Jem fainted, and I felt no disposition to further confidences. I took as cheerful a farewell of my mother as I could, for her sake; and put on a good deal of swagger and “don’t care” to console Jem. He said, “You’re as plucky as Lorraine,” and then his eyes shut again. He was too ill to think much, and I kissed his head and left him. After which I got stoutly into the dog-cart, and we drove back up the dreary hills down which Jem and I had run away.

That Snuffy was bland to cringing before my father did not give me hope that I should escape his direst revenge; and the expression of Lorraine’s face showed me, by its sympathy, what he expected. But we were both wrong, and for reasons which we then knew nothing about.

Cruelty was, as I have said, Mr. Crayshaw’s ruling passion, but it was not his only vice. There was a whispered tradition that he had once been in jail for a misuse of his acquirements in the art of penmanship; and if you heard his name cropping up in the confidential conversation of such neighbours as small farmers, the postman, the parish overseer, and the like, it was sure to be linked with unpleasingly suggestive expressions, such as—“a dirty bit of business,” “a nasty job that,” “an awkward affair,” “very near got into trouble,” “a bit of bother about it, but Driver and Quills pulled him through; theirs isn’t a nice business, and they’re men of t’ same feather as Crayshaw, so I reckon they’re friends.” Many such hints have I heard, for the ‘White Lion’ was next door to the sweet-shop, and in summer, refreshment of a sober kind, with conversation to match, was apt to be enjoyed on the benches outside. The good wives of the neighbourhood used no such euphuisms as their more prudent husbands, when they spoke of Crayshaw’s. Indeed one of the whispered anecdotes of Snuffy’s past was of a hushed-up story that was just saved from becoming a scandal, but in reference to which Mr. Crayshaw was even more narrowly saved from a crowd of women who had taken the too-tardy law into their own hands. I remember myself the retreat of an unpaid washerwoman from the back premises of Crayshaw’s on one occasion, and the unmistakable terms in which she expressed her opinions.

“Don’t tell me! I know Crayshaw’s well enough; such folks is a curse to a country-side, but judgment overtakes ’em at last.”

“Judgment,” as the good woman worded it, kept threatening Mr. Crayshaw long before it overtook him, as it is apt to disturb scoundrels who keep a hypocritical good name above their hidden misdeeds. As it happened, at the very time Jem and I ran away from him, Mr. Crayshaw himself was living in terror of one or two revelations, and to be deserted by two of his most respectably connected boys was an ill-timed misfortune. The countenance my father had been so mistaken as to afford to his establishment was very important to him, for we were the only pupils from within fifty miles, and our parents’ good word constituted an “unexceptionable reference.”

Thus it was that Snuffy pleaded humbly (but in vain) for the return of Jem, and that he not only promised that I should not suffer, but to my amazement kept his word.

Judgment lingered over the head of Crayshaw’s for two years longer, and I really think my being there had something to do with maintaining its tottering reputation. I was almost the only lad in the school whose parents were alive and at hand and in a good position, and my father’s name stifled scandal. Most of the others were orphans, being cheaply educated by distant relatives or guardians, or else the sons of poor widows who were easily bamboozled by Snuffy’s fluent letters, and the religious leaflets which it was his custom to enclose. (In several of these cases, he was “managing” the poor women’s “affairs” for them.) One or two boys belonged to people living abroad. Indeed, the worst bully in the school was a half-caste, whose smile, when he showed his gleaming teeth, boded worse than any other boy’s frown. He was a wonderful acrobat, and could do extraordinary tricks of all sorts. My being nimble and ready made me very useful to him as a confederate in the exhibitions which his intense vanity delighted to give on half-holidays, and kept me in his good graces till I was old enough to take care of myself. Oh, how every boy who dreaded him applauded at these entertainments! And what dangerous feats I performed, every other fear being lost in the fear of him! I owe him no grudge for what he forced me to do (though I have had to bear real fire without flinching when he failed in a conjuring trick, which should only have simulated the real thing); what I learned from him has come in so useful since, that I forgive him all.

I was there for two years longer. Snuffy bullied me less, and hated me the more. I knew it, and he knew that I knew it. It was a hateful life, but I am sure the influence of a good home holds one up in very evil paths. Every time we went back to our respective schools my father gave us ten shillings, and told us to mind our books, and my mother kissed us and made us promise we would say our prayers every day. I could not bear to break my promise, though I used to say them in bed (the old form we learnt from her), and often in such a very unfit frame of mind, that they were what it is very easy to call “a mockery.”

God knows (Who alone knows the conditions under which each soul blunders and spells on through life’s hard lessons) if they were a mockery. I know they were unworthy to be offered to Him, but that the habit helped to keep me straight I am equally sure. Then I had a good home to go to during the holidays. That was everything, and it is in all humbleness that I say that I do not think the ill experiences of those years degraded me much. I managed to keep some truth and tenderness about me; and I am thankful to remember that I no more cringed to Crayshaw than Lorraine did, and that though I stayed there till I was a big boy, I never maltreated a little one.

“Whose powers shed round him in the common strife
Or mild concerns of ordinary life,
A constant influence, a peculiar grace;
*     *     *     *     *
Or if an unexpected call succeed,
Come when it will, is equal to the need.”
Wordsworth’s Happy Warrior.

Judgement came at last. During my first holidays I had posted a letter from Lewis Lorraine to the uncle in India to whom he had before endeavoured to appeal. The envelope did not lack stamps, but the address was very imperfect, and it was many months in reaching him. He wrote a letter, which Lewis never received, Mr. Crayshaw probably knew why. But twelve months after that Colonel Jervois came to England, and he lost no time in betaking himself to Crayshaw’s. From Crayshaw’s he came to my father, the only “unexceptionable reference” left to Snuffy to put forward.

The Colonel came with a soldier’s promptness, and, with the utmost courtesy of manner, went straight to the point. His life had not accustomed him to our neighbourly unwillingness to interfere with anything that did not personally concern us, nor to the prudent patience with which country folk will wink long at local evils. In the upshot what he asked was what my mother had asked three years before. Had my father personal knowledge or good authority for believing the school to be a well-conducted one, and Mr. Crayshaw a fit man for his responsible post? Had he ever heard rumours to the man’s discredit?

Replies that must do for a wife will not always answer a man who puts the same questions. My great-grandfather’s memory was not evoked on this occasion, and my father frankly confessed that his personal knowledge of Crayshaw’s was very small, and that the man on whose recommendation he had sent us to school there had just proved to be a rascal and a swindler. Our mother had certainly heard rumours of severity, but he had regarded her maternal anxiety as excessive, etc., etc. In short, my dear father saw that he had been wrong, and confessed it, and was now as ready as the Colonel to expose Snuffy’s misdeeds.

No elaborate investigation was needed. An attack once made on Mr. Crayshaw’s hollow reputation, it cracked on every side; first hints crept out, then scandals flew. The Colonel gave no quarter, and he did not limit his interest to his own nephew.

“A widow’s son, ma’am,” so he said to my mother, bowing over her hand as he led her in to dinner, in a style to which we were quite unaccustomed; “a widow’s son, ma’am, should find a father in every honest man who can assist him.”

The tide having turned against Snuffy, his friends (of the Driver and Quills type) turned with it. But they gained nothing, for one morning he got up as early as we had done, and ran away, and I never heard of him again. And before nightfall the neighbours, who had so long tolerated his wickedness, broke every pane of glass in his windows.

During all this, Lewis Lorraine and his uncle stayed at our house. The Colonel spent his time between holding indignant investigations, writing indignant letters (which he allowed us to seal with his huge signet), and walking backwards and forwards to the town to buy presents for the little boys.

When Snuffy ran away, and the school was left to itself, Colonel Jervois strode off to the nearest farm, requisitioned a waggon, and having packed the boys into it, bought loaves and milk enough to breakfast them all, and transported the whole twenty-eight to our door. He left four with my mother, and marched off with the rest. The Woods took in a large batch, and in the course of the afternoon he had for love or money quartered them all. He betrayed no nervousness in dealing with numbers, in foraging for supplies, or in asking for what he wanted. Whilst other people had been doubting whether it might not “create unpleasantness” to interfere in this case and that, the Colonel had fought each boy’s battle, and seen most of them off on their homeward journeys. He was used to dealing with men, and with emergencies, and it puzzled him when my Uncle Henry consulted his law-books and advised caution, and my father saw his agent on farm business, whilst the fate of one of Crayshaw’s victims yet hung in the balance.

When all was over the Colonel left us, and took Lewis with him, and his departure raised curiously mixed feelings of regret and relief.

He had quite won my mother’s heart, chiefly by his energy and tenderness for the poor boys, and partly by his kindly courtesy and deference towards her. Indeed all ladies liked him—all, that is, who knew him. Before they came under the influence of his pleasantness and politeness, he shared the half-hostile reception to which any person or anything that was foreign to our daily experience was subjected in our neighbourhood. So that the first time Colonel Jervois appeared in our pew, Mrs. Simpson (the wife of a well-to-do man of business who lived near us) said to my mother after church, “I see you’ve got one of the military with you,” and her tone was more critical than congratulatory. But when my mother, with unconscious diplomacy, had kept her to luncheon, and the Colonel had handed her to her seat, and had stroked his moustache, and asked in his best manner if she meant to devote her son to the service of his country, Mrs. Simpson undid her bonnet-strings, fairly turned her back on my father, and was quite unconscious when Martha handed the potatoes; and she left us wreathed in smiles, and resolved that Mr. Simpson should buy their son Horace a commission instead of taking him into the business. Mr. Simpson did not share her views, and I believe he said some rather nasty things about swaggering, and not having one sixpence to rub against another. And Mrs. Simpson (who was really devoted to Horace and could hardly bear him out of her sight) reflected that it was possible to get shot as well as to grow a moustache if you went into the army; but she still maintained that she should always remember the Colonel as a thorough gentleman, and a wonderful judge of the character of boys.