Part 1 — CHAPTER I. (continued 2)

“Oh—h!” I exclaimed once more, but this time in a different tone.

Mr. Wood laughed heartily. “Tropical loveliness has its drawbacks, Jack. Perhaps some day when your clothes are moulded, and your brain feels mouldy too with damp heat, and you can neither work in the

I laughed too, but I shook my head.

“No. I shan’t mind the insects if I can get there. Charlie, were those wonderful ants old Isaac said you’d been reading about, Bermuda ants?”

I did not catch Charlie’s muttered reply, and when I looked round I saw that his face was buried in the red cushions, and that he was (what Jem used to call) “in one of his tempers.”

I don’t exactly know how it was. I don’t think Charlie was jealous or really cross, but he used to take fits of fancying he was in the way, and out of it all (from being a cripple), if we seemed to be very busy without him, especially about such things as planning adventures. I knew what was the matter directly, but I’m afraid my consolation was rather clumsy.

“Don’t be cross, Charlie,” I said; “I thought you were listening too, and if it’s because you think you won’t be able to go, I don’t believe there’s really a bit more chance of my going, though my legs are all right.”

“Don’t bother about me,” said Charlie; “but I wish you’d put these numbers down, they’re in my way.” And he turned pettishly over.

“When your father has been bringing you down here, or at any time when you have been out amongst other people, have you ever overheard them saying, ‘Poor chap! it’s a sad thing,’ and things of that kind, as if they were sorry for you?”

Cripple Charlie’s face flushed scarlet, and my own cheeks burned, as I looked daggers at the school-master, for what seemed a brutal insensibility to the lame boy’s feelings. He did not condescend, however, to meet my eyes. His own were still fixed steadily on Charlie’s, and he went on.

“I’ve heard it. My ears are quick, and for many a Sunday after I came I caught the whispers behind me as I went up the aisle, ‘Poor man!’ ‘Poor gentleman!’ ‘He looks bad, too!’ One morning an old woman, in a big black bonnet, said, ‘Poor

“It must have been Betty Johnson,” I interpolated; but the school-master did not even look at me.

“You and I,” he said, bending nearer to Cripple Charlie, “have had our share of this life’s pain so dealt out to us that any one can see and pity us. My boy, take a fellow-sufferer’s word for it, it is wise and good not to shrink from the seeing and pitying. The weight of the cross spreads itself and becomes lighter if one learns to suffer with others as well as with oneself, to take pity and to give it. And as one learns to be pained with the pains of others, one learns to be happy in their happiness and comforted by their sympathy, and then no man’s life can be quite empty of pleasure. I don’t know if my troubles have been lighter or heavier ones than yours——”

The school-master stopped short, and turned his head so that his face was almost hidden against his hand upon the wall. Charlie’s big eyes were full of tears, and I am sure I distinctly felt my ears poke

“When I was your age,” he said bluntly, “I was unusually lithe and active and strong for mine. When I was half as old again, I was stronger than any man I knew, and had many a boyish triumph out of my strength, because I was slender and graceful, and this concealed my powers. I had all the energies and ambitions natural to unusual vigour and manly skill. I wanted to be a soldier, but it was not to be, and I spent my youth at a desk in a house of business. I adapted myself, but none the less I chafed whenever I heard of manly exploits, and of the delights and dangers that came of seeing the world. I used to think I could bear anything to cross the seas and see foreign climes. I did cross the Atlantic at last—a convict in a convict ship (God help any man who knows what that is!), and I spent the ten best years of my manhood at the hulks working in chains. You’ve never lost freedom, my lad, so you have never felt what it is not to be able to believe you’ve got it back. You don’t know what it is to turn nervous at the responsibility of being your own master for a whole day, or to wake in a dainty room, with the birds singing at the open window, and to shut your eyes quickly and pray to

The school-master lifted his other hand above his head, and pressed both on it, as if he were in pain. What Charlie was doing I don’t know, but I felt so miserable I could not help crying, and had to hunt for my pocket-handkerchief under the table. It was full of acorns, and by the time I had emptied it and dried my eyes, Mr. Wood was lifting Charlie in his arms, and arranging his cushions.

“Oh, thank you!” Charlie said, as he leant back; “how comfortable you have made me!”

“I have been sick-nurse, amongst other trades. For some months I was a hospital warder.”

“Was that when——” Charlie began, and then he stopped short, and said, “Oh, I beg your pardon!”

“Yes; it was when I was a convict,” said the school-master. “No offence, my boy. If I preach I must try to practise. Jack’s eyes are dropping out of his head to hear more of Bermuda, and you and I will put our whims and moods on one side, and we’ll all tell travellers’ tales together.”

Cripple Charlie kept on saying “Thank you,” and I know he was very sorry not to be able to think of anything more to say, for he told me so. He wanted to have thanked him better, because he knew that Mr. Wood had talked about his having been a

And that was the beginning of all the stories the school-master used to tell us, and of the natural history lessons he gave us, and of his teaching me to stuff birds, and do all kinds of things.

We used to say to him, “You’re better than the Penny Numbers, for you’re quite as interesting, and we’re sure you’re true.” And the odd thing was that he made Charlie much more contented, because he started him with so many collections, whilst he made me only more and more anxious to see the world.

“Much would have more, and lost all.”—English Proverb.

“Learn you to an ill habit, and ye’ll ca’t custom.” Scotch Proverb.

The lane was full of colour that autumn, the first autumn of the convict’s return. The leaves turned early, and fell late, and made the hedges gayer than when the dog-roses were out; for not only were the leaves of all kinds brighter than many flowers, but the berries (from the holly and mountain-ash to the hips and haws) were so thick-set, and so red and shining, that, as my dear mother said, “they looked almost artificial.”

I remember it well, because of two things. First, that Jem got five of the largest hips we had ever seen off a leafless dog-rose branch which stuck far out of the hedge, and picked the little green coronets off, so that they were smooth and glossy, and egg-shaped, and crimson on one side and yellow on the other; and then he got an empty chaffinch’s nest close by and put the five hips into it, and took it

The second thing I remember that autumn by, is that everybody expected a hard winter because of the berries being so fine, and the hard winter never came, and the birds ate worms and grubs and left most of the hedge fruits where they were.

November was bright and mild, and the morning frosts only made the berries all the glossier when the sun came out. We had one or two snow-storms in December, and then we all said, “Now it’s coming!” but the snow melted away and left no bones behind. In January the snow lay longer, and left big bones on the moors, and Jem and I made a slide to school on the pack track, and towards the end of the month the mill-dam froze hard, and we had slides fifteen yards long, and skating; and Winter seemed to have come back in good earnest to fetch his bones away.

Jem was great fun in frosty weather; Charlie and I used to die of laughing at him. I think cold made him pugnacious; he seemed always ready for a row, and was constantly in one. The January frost came in our Christmas holidays, so Jem had lots of time on his hands; he spent almost all of it out of doors, and he devoted a good deal of it to fighting with the

Perhaps it is because gratitude is a fatiguing virtue, or perhaps it is because self-esteem has no practical limits, that favours are seldom regarded as such for long. They are either depreciated, or claimed as rights; very often both. And what is common in all classes is almost universal amongst the uneducated. You have only to make a system of giving your cast-off clothes to some shivering family, and you will not have to wait long for an eloquent essay on their shabbiness, or for an outburst of sincere indignation if you venture to reserve a warm jacket for a needy relative. Prescriptive rights, in short, grow faster than pumpkins, which is amongst the many warnings life affords us to be just as well as

Our neighbours were what is called “very independent” folk. In the grown-up people this was modified by the fact that no one who has to earn his own livelihood can be quite independent of other people; if he would live he must let live, and throw a little civility into the bargain. But boys of an age when their parents found meals and hobnailed boots for them whether they behaved well or ill, were able to display independence in its roughest form. And when the boys of our neighbourhood were rough, they were very rough indeed.

The village boys had their Christmas holidays about the same time that we had ours, which left them as much spare time for sliding and skating as we had, but they had their dinner at twelve o’clock, whilst we had ours at one, so that any young roughs who wished to damage our pond were just comfortably beginning their mischief as Jem and I were saying grace before meat, and the thought of it took away our appetites again and again.

(Having lately been reading about the Highlanders, who used to send round a fiery cross when the clans were called to battle, I should have liked to do so in this instance; but as some of the Academy boys were no greater readers than Jem, they might not have known what it meant, so we abandoned the notion.)

There was not an Academy boy worth speaking of who was in time for dinner the following day; and several of them brought brothers or cousins to the fray. By half-past twelve we had crept down the field that was on the other side of our wall, and had hidden ourselves in various corners of a cattle-shed, where a big cart and some sail-cloth and a turnip heap provided us with ambush. By and by certain familiar whoops and hullohs announced that the enemy was coming. One or two bigger boys made for the dam (which I confess was a relief to us), but our own particular foes advanced with a rush upon the wall.

“They hevn’t coomed yet, hev they?” we heard the sexton’s son say, as he peeped over at our pond.

“Noa,” was the reply. “It’s not gone one yet.”

“It’s gone one by t’ church. I yeard it as we was coming up t’ lane.”

“It isn’t!”

“It is.”

“T’ church clock’s t’ one to go by, anyhow,” the sexton’s son maintained.

His friend guffawed aloud.

“And it’s a reight ’un to go by too, my sakes! when thee feyther shifts t’ time back’ards and for’ards every Sunday morning to suit hissen.”

“To suit hissen! To suit t’ ringers, ye mean!” said the sexton’s son.

“What’s thou to do wi’ t’ ringers?” was the reply, enforced apparently by a punch in the back, and the two lads came cuffing and struggling up the field, much to my alarm, but fortunately they were too busy to notice us.

Meanwhile, the rest had not been idle at the wall. Jem had climbed on the cart, and peeping through a brick hole he could see that they had with some difficulty disengaged a very heavy stone. As we were turning our heads to watch the two lads fighting near our hiding-place, we heard the stone strike with a heavy thud upon the rotten ice below, and it was echoed by a groan of satisfaction from above.

(“Ready!” I whispered.)

“You’ll break somebody’s nose when it’s frosted

“Eh, Tim Binder! there’ll be a rare job for thee feyther next spring, fettling up this wall, by t’ time we’ve done wi’ it.”

“Let me come,” we heard Tim say. “Thou can’t handle a stone. Let me come. Th’ ice is as soft as loppered milk, and i’ ten minutes, I’ll fill yon bit they’re so chuff of skating on, as thick wi’ stones as a quarry.”

(“Now!” I said.)

Our foes considerably outnumbered us, but I think they were at a disadvantage. They had worked off a good deal of their steam, and ours was at explosion point. We took them by surprise and in the rear. They had had some hard exercise, and we were panting to begin. As a matter of fact those who could get away ran away. We caught all we could, and punched and pummelled and rolled them in the snow to our hearts’ content.

Jem never was much of a talker, and I never knew him speak when he was fighting; but three several times on this occasion, I heard him say very stiffly and distinctly (he was on the top of Tim Binder), “I’ll fettle thee! I’ll fettle thee! I’ll fettle thee!”

The battle was over, the victory was ours, but the campaign was not ended, and thenceforward the disWe had our own code of honour and fairness, but Bob Furniss was not above putting a stone into a snowball if he owed a grudge.

So when we heard a rumour that the bigger “roughs” were going to join the younger ones, and lie in wait to “pay us off” the first day we came down to the ice, I cannot say we felt comfortable, though we resolved to be courageous. Meanwhile, the thaw continued, which suspended operations, and gave time, which is good for healing; and Christmas came, and we and our foes met and mingled in the mummeries of the season, and wished each other Happy New Years, and said nothing about the pond.

How my father came to hear of the matter we did not know at the time, but one morning he summoned Jem and me, and bade us tell him all about it. I was always rather afraid of my father, and I should have made out a very stammering story, but Jem flushed up like a turkey-cock, and gave our version of the business very straightforwardly. The other side of the tale my father had evidently heard, and we fancied he must have heard also of the intended

My father waved our dismissal, but I hesitated.

“The boys won’t think we told tales to you to get out of another fight?” I gasped.

“Everybody knows perfectly well how I heard. It came to the sexton’s ears, and he very properly informed me.”

I felt relieved, and the first day we had on the ice went off very fairly. The boys were sheepish at first and slow to come on, and when they had assembled in force they were inclined to be bullying. But Jem

And Jem was wonderfully peaceable for the rest of the day. A word from my father went a long way with him. They were very fond of each other.

I had no love of fighting for fighting’s sake, and I had other interests besides sliding and skating; so I was well satisfied that we got through the January frost without further breaches of the peace. Towards the end of the month we all went a good deal upon the mill-dam, and Mr. Wood (assisted by me as far as watching, handing tools and asking questions went) made a rough sledge, in which he pushed Charlie before him as he skated; and I believe the village boys, as well as his own school-fellows, were glad that Cripple Charlie had a share in the winter fun, for wherever Mr. Wood drove him, both sliders and skaters made way.

And even on the pond there were no more real battles that winter. Only now and then some mischievous urchin tripped up our brand-new skates, and begged our pardon as he left us on our backs. And

“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.

“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.

“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

“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

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

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

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?”

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?”

“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

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-

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

“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

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

“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

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.

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 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

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

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,

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

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

“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

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

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.

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

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 God bless Father and Mother,’ and when he had, he went in and fought, and I

“——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

“——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

“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,

“——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;

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

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

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

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—

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.

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,

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

“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

I was there for two years longer. Snuffy bullied me less, and hated me the more. I knew it, and he

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

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,

“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

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

His moral courage had taken away our breath, and physical courage was stamped upon his outward man. If he was anything he was manly. It was because he was in some respects very womanly too, that he puzzled my father’s purely masculine brain. The mixture, and the vehemence of the mixture, were not in his line. He would have

The servants one and all adored Colonel Jervois. They are rather acute judges of good breeding, and men and maids were at one on the fact that he was a visitor who conferred social distinction on the establishment. They had decided that we should “dine late so long as The Gentleman” was with us, whilst my mother was thinking how to break so weighty an innovation to such valuable servants. They served him with alacrity, and approved of his brief orders and gracious thanks. The Colonel did unheard-of things with impunity—threw open his bed-room shutters at night, and more than once unbarred and unbolted the front door to go outside for a late cigar. Nothing puzzled Martha more than the nattiness with which he put all the bolts and bars back into their places, as if he had been used to the door as long as she had.

Indeed he had all that power of making himself at home, which is most fully acquired by having

One day he penetrated into the kitchen (having previously been rummaging the kitchen-garden) and insisted upon teaching our cook how to make curry. The lesson was much needed, and it was equally well intended, but it was a mistake. Everything cannot be carried by storm, whatever the military may think. Jane said, “Yes, sir,” at every point that approached to a pause in the Colonel’s ample instructions, but she never moved her eyes from the magnificent moustache which drooped above the stew-pan, nor her thoughts from the one idea produced by the occasion—that The Gentleman had caught her without her cap. In short our curries were no worse, and no better, in consequence of the shock to kitchen etiquette (for that was all) which she received.

And yet we modified our household ways for him, as they were never modified for any one else. On Martha’s weekly festival for cleaning the bedrooms (and if a room was occupied for a night, she scrubbed after the intruder as if he had brought the plague in his portmanteau) the smartest visitor we ever entertained had to pick his or her way through the upper regions of the house, where soap and soda were wafted on high and unexpected

On the day of his departure, my lamentations had met with the warmest sympathy as I stirred toffy over Jane’s kitchen fire, whilst Martha lingered with the breakfast things, after a fashion very unusual with her, and gazed at the toast-rack and said, “the Colonel had eaten nothing of a breakfast to travel on.” But next morning, I met her in another mood. It was a mood to which we were not strangers, though it did not often occur. In brief, Martha (like many another invaluable domestic) “had a temper of her own”; but to do her justice her ill feelings generally expended themselves in a rage for work, and in taking as little ease herself as she allowed to other people. I knew what it meant when I found her cleaning the best silver when she ought to have been eating her breakfast; but my

It had no such effect on mine. Lewis Lorraine himself did not worship his uncle more devoutly than I. Colonel Jervois had given me a new ideal. It was possible, then, to be enthusiastic without being unmanly; to live years out of England, and come back more patriotic than many people who stayed comfortably at home; to go forth into the world and be the simpler as well as the wiser, the softer as well as the stronger for the experience? So it seemed. And yet Lewis had told me, with such tears as Snuffy never made him shed, how

“He cried as bad as I did,” Lewis said, “and begged me to forgive him for having trusted so much to my other guardian. Do you know, Jack, Snuffy regularly forged a letter like my handwriting, to answer that one Uncle Eustace wrote, which he kept back? He might well do such good copies, and write the year of Our Lord with a swan at the end of the last flourish! And you remember what we heard about his having been in prison—but, oh, dear! I don’t want to remember. He says I am to forget, and he forbade me to talk about Crayshaw’s, and said I was not to trouble my head about anything that had happened there. He kept saying, ‘Forget, my boy, forget! Say God help me, and look forward. While there’s life there’s always the chance of a better life for every one. Forget! forget!’”

Lewis departed with his uncle. Charlie went for two nights to the moors. Jem’s holidays had not begun, and in our house we were “cleaning down” after the Colonel as if he had been the sweeps.

I went to old Isaac for sympathy. He had

His sympathy met me more than half-way. The villagers as a body were unbounded in their approval of the Colonel, and Mrs. Irvine was even greedier than old Isaac for every particular I could impart respecting him.

“He’s a handsome gentleman,” said the bee-master’s wife, “and he passed us (my neighbour, Mrs. Mettam, and me) as near, sir, as I am to you, with a gold-headed stick in his hand, and them lads following after him, for all the world like the Good Shepherd and his flock.”

I managed not to laugh, and old Isaac added, “There’s a many in this village, sir, would have been glad to have taken the liberty of expressing themselves to the Colonel, and a depitation did get as far as your father’s gates one night, but they turned bashful and come home again. And I know, for one, Master Jack, that if me and my missus had had a room fit to offer one of them poor young gentlemen, I’d have given a week’s wage to do it, and the old woman would have been happy to her dying day.”

“God help me! save I take my part Of danger on the roaring sea, A devil rises in my heart, Far worse than any death to me.” Tennyson’s Sailor-boy.

The fact that my father had sent me back against my will to a school where I had suffered so much and learnt so little, ought perhaps to have drawn us together when he discovered his mistake. Unfortunately it did not. He was deeply annoyed with himself for having been taken in by Snuffy, but he transferred some of this annoyance to me, on grounds which cut me to the soul, and which I fear I resented so much that I was not in a mood that was favourable to producing a better understanding between us. The injustice which I felt so keenly was, that my father reproached me with having what he called “kept him in the dark” about the life at Crayshaw’s. At my age I must have seen how wicked the man and his system were.

“I don’t wish to discuss the subject. It is a very painful one,” he said (and I believe it was as physically distressing to him as the thought of Cripple Charlie’s malformation). “I have no wish to force your confidence when it is too late,” he added (and it was this which I felt to be so hard). “I don’t blame you; you have other friends who suit you better, but you have never been fully open with me. All I can say is, if Mr. Wood was better informed than I have been, and did not acquaint me, he has behaved in a manner which—— There—don’t speak! we’ll dismiss the subject. You have suffered enough, if you have not acted as I should have expected you to act. I blame myself unutterably, and I hope I see my way to such a comfortable and respectable start in life for you that these three years in that vile place may not be to your permanent disadvantage.”

I was just opening my lips to thank him, when he got up and went to his tall desk, where he took a pinch of snuff, and then added as he turned away, “Thank God I have one son who is frank with his father!”

My lips were sealed in an instant. This, then, was my reward for that hard journey of escape, with Jem on my back, which had only saved him; for

My father did not look up, but he nodded his head and said, “Yes; you may go.”

As I went he called me back.

“Are you going to the farm this afternoon?”

To my own infinite annoyance I blushed as I answered, “I was going to sit with Charlie a bit, unless you have any objection.”

“Not at all. I only asked for information. I have no wish to interfere with any respectable friends you may be disposed to give your confidence to. But I should like it to be understood that either your mother or I must have some knowledge of your movements.”

“Mother knew quite well I was going!” I exclaimed “Why, I’ve got a parcel to take to Mrs. Wood from her.”

“Very good. There’s no occasion to display temper. Shut the door after you.”

Our household affections were too sound at the core for the mere fact of displeasing my father not to weigh heavily on my soul. But I could not help defending myself in my own mind against what I knew to be injustice.

Jem “frank with his father”? Well he might be, when our father’s partiality met him half-way at every turn. That was no fancy of mine. I had the clearest of childish remembrances of an occasion when I wanted to do something which our farming-man thought my father would not approve, and how when I urged the fact that Jem had already done it with impunity, he shook his head wiseacrely, and said, “Aye, aye, Master Jack. But ye know they say some folks may steal a horse, when other folks mayn’t look over the hedge.”

The vagueness of “some folks” and “other folks” had left the proverb dark to my understanding when I heard it, but I remembered it till I understood it.

I am sure the early-begun and oft-reiterated teaching of daily thankfulness for daily blessing was very useful to me at Crayshaw’s and has been useful to me ever since. With my dear mother herself it was

I certainly had needed all my philosophy at home as well as at school. It was hard to come back, one holiday-time after another, ignorant except for books that I devoured in the holidays, and for my own independent studies of maps, and an old geography book at Snuffy’s from which I was allowed to give lessons to the lowest form; rough in looks, and dress, and manners (I knew it, but it requires some self-respect even to use a nail-brush, and self-respect was next door to impossible at Crayshaw’s); and with my north-country accent deepened, and my conversation disfigured by slang which, not being fashionable slang, was as inadmissible as thieves’ lingo; it was hard, I say, to come back thus, and meet dear old Jem, and

Jem’s heart was as true to me as ever, but he was not so thin-skinned as I am. He was never a fellow who worried himself much about anything, and I don’t think it struck him I could feel hurt or lonely. He would say, “I say, Jack, what a beastly way your hair is cut. I wish Father would let you come to our school:” or, “Don’t say it was a dirty trick—say it was a beastly chouse, or something of that sort. We’re awfully particular about talking at ——’s, and I don’t want Cholmondley to hear you.”

Jem was wonderfully polished-up himself, and as pugnacious on behalf of all the institutions of his school as he had once been about our pond. I got my hair as near right as one cutting and the town hair-cutter could bring it, and mended my manners and held my own with good temper. When it came to feats of skill or endurance, I more than held my own. Indeed, I so amazed one very “swell” little friend of Jem’s whose mother (a titled lady) had allowed him to spend part of the summer holidays with Jem for change of air, that he vowed I must go and stay with him in the winter, and do juggler and

For the spell of the Penny Numbers had not grown weaker as I grew older. In the holidays I came back to them as to friends. At school they made the faded maps on Snuffy’s dirty walls alive with visions, and many a night as I lay awake with pain and over-weariness in the stifling dormitory, my thoughts took refuge not in dreams of home nor in castles of the air, but in phantom ships that sailed for ever round the world.

The day of the interview with my father I roused myself from my grievances to consider a more practical question. Why should I not go to sea? No matter whose fault it was, there was no doubt that I was ill-educated, and that I did not please my father as Jem did. On the other hand I was strong and hardy, nimble and willing to obey; and I had roughed it enough, in all conscience. I must have ill luck indeed, if I lit upon a captain more cruel than

He refused, and he accompanied his refusal with an unfavourable commentary on my character and conduct, which was not the less bitter because the accusations were chiefly general.

This sudden fancy for the sea—well, if it were not a sudden fancy, but a dream of my life, what a painful instance it afforded of my habitual want of frankness!—This long-concealed project which I had suddenly brought to the surface—I had talked about it to my mother years ago, had I, but it had distressed her, and even to my father, but he had snubbed me?—then I had been deliberately fostering aims and plans to which I had always known that my parents would be opposed. My father didn’t believe a word of it. weak-womanish—way in which I worshipped him. If I were a daughter instead of a son, my caprices would distress and astonish him less. He could have sent me to my mother, and my mother might have sent me to my needle. In a son, from whom he looked for manly feeling and good English common-sense, it was painful in the extreme. Vanity, the love of my own way, and want of candour—(my father took a pinch of snuff between each count of the indictment)—these were my besetting sins, and would lead me into serious trouble. This new fad, just, too, when he had made most favourable arrangements for my admission into my Uncle Henry’s office as the first step in a prosperous career. I didn’t know; didn’t I? Perhaps not. Perhaps I had been at the Woods’ when he and my mother were speaking of it. But now I did know. The matter was decided, and he hoped I should profit by my opportunities. I might go, and I was to shut the door after me.

God-fearing atmosphere about my home, and to which I owe all the strength I have found against evil since I left it, was far too sincere in both my parents for me to speak of any phase of it with disrespect. Though I may say here that I think it is to be wished that more good people exercised judgment as well as faith in tracing the will of Heaven in their own. Practically I did not even then believe that I was more “called” to that station of life which was to be found in Uncle Henry’s office, than to that station of life which I should find on board a vessel in the Merchant Service, and it only discredited truth in my inmost soul when my father put his plans for my career in that light. Just as I could not help feeling it unfair that a commandment which might have been fairly appealed to if I had disobeyed him, should be used against me in argument because I disagreed with him.

I did disagree with him utterly. Uncle Henry’s office was a gloomy place, where I had had to endure long periods of waiting as a child when my mother took us in to the dentist, and had shopping and visiting of uncertain length to do. Uncle Henry himself was no favourite with me. He was harder than my

So when my father spoke kindly to me at supper, and said that he had arranged with Mr. Wood that I should read with him for two hours every evening, in preparation for my future life as an articled clerk, my heart was softened. I thanked him gratefully, and resolved for my own part to follow what seemed to be the plain path of duty, though it led to Uncle Henry’s office, and not out into the world.

The capacity in which I began life in Uncle Henry’s office was that of office boy, and the situation was attended in my case with many favourable conditions. Uncle Henry wished me to sleep on the premises, as my predecessor had done, but an accidental circumstance led to my coming home daily, which I infinitely preferred. This was nothing less than an outbreak of boils all over me, upon which, every domestic application having failed, and gallons

She was delighted. She thought (even more than usual) that Doctor Brown was a very Solomon in spectacles, and I quite agreed with her. The few words that followed gave a slight shock to her favourable opinion of his wisdom, but I need hardly say that it confirmed mine.

He had given me a kindly slap on the shoulder, which happened at that moment to be the sorest point in my body, and I was in no small pain from head to foot. I only tightened my lips, but I suppose he bethought himself of what he had done, and he looked keenly at me and said, “You can bear pain, Master Jack?”

“Oh, Jack’s a very brave boy,” said my dear mother. “Indeed, he’s only too brave. He upset his father and me terribly last week by wanting to go to sea instead of to the office.”

“That’s just what I think!” I began, but my mother coloured crimson with distress, and I stopped, and went after her worsted ball which she had dropped, whilst she appealed to Doctor Brown.

“Pray don’t say so, Doctor Brown. Jack is very good, and it’s all quite decided. I couldn’t part with him, and his father would be so annoyed if the subject——”

“Tut, tut, ma’am!” said the doctor, pocketing his spectacles; “I never interfere with family affairs, and I never repeat what I hear. The first rules of the profession, young gentleman, and very good general rules for anybody.”

I got quite well again, and my new life began. I rode in and out of the town every day on Rob Roy, our red-haired pony. After tea I went to the farm to be taught by Mr. Wood, and at every opportunity I devoured such books as I could lay my hands on. I fear I had very little excuse for not being contented now. And yet I was not content.

It seems absurd to say that the drains had anything to do with it, but the horrible smell which pervaded the office added to the distastefulness of the

My uncle pooh-poohed the unwholesome state of the office, for two reasons which certainly had some weight. The first was that he himself had been there for five-and-twenty years without suffering by it; and the second was, that the defects of drainage were so radical that (the place belonging to that period of house-building when the system of drainage was often worse than none at all) half the premises, if not half the street, would have to be pulled down for any effectual remedy. So it was left as it was, and when Mr. Burton, the head clerk, had worse headaches than usual, he used to give me sixpence for chloride of lime, which I distributed at my discretion, and on those days Moses Benson used generally to say that he “fancied he smelt something.”

Moses Benson was an articled clerk to my uncle, but he had no pretensions to be considered a gentleman. His father kept a small shop where second-hand watches were the most obvious goods; but the old man was said to have money, though the watches did not seem to sell very fast, and his son had duly qualified for his post, and had paid a good premium.

Mr. Burton (the other clerk, whose time was to expire the following year, which was to make a vacancy for me) was a very different man from Moses Benson. He was respectably connected, and looked down on “the Jew-boy,” but he was hot-tempered, and rather slow-witted, and I think Moses could manage him; and I think it was he who kept their constant “tiffs” from coming to real quarrels.

One day, very soon after I began office-life, Benson sent me out to get him some fancy notepaper, and when I came back I saw the red-haired Mr. Burton standing by the desk and looking rather more sickly and cross than usual. I laid down the paper and the change, and asked if Benson wanted anything else. He thanked me exceedingly kindly, and said, “No,” and I went out of the enclosure and back to the corner where I had been cutting out some newspaper extracts for my uncle. At the same time I drew from under my overcoat which was lying there, an old railway volume of one of Cooper’s novels which Charlie had lent me. I ought not to have been reading novels in office-hours, but I had had to stop short last night because my candle went out just at the most exciting point, and I had had no time to see what became of everybody before I

How it was in these circumstances that I heard what the two clerks were saying, I don’t know. They talked constantly in these open enclosures, when they knew I was within hearing. On this occasion I suppose they thought I had gone out, and it was some minutes before I discovered that they were talking of me. Burton spoke first, and in an irritated tone.

“You treat this young shaver precious different to the last one.”

The Jew spoke very softly, and with an occasional softening of the consonants in his words. “How obsherving you are!” said he.

Burton snorted. “It don’t take much observation to see that. But I suppose you have your reasons. You Jews are always so sly. That’s how you get on so, I suppose.”

“You Gentiles,” replied Moses (and the Jew’s voice had tones which gave him an infinite advantage in retaliating scorn), “you Gentiles would do as well as we do if you were able to foresee and knew how to wait. You have all the selfishness for success, my dear, but the gifts of prophecy and patience are wanting to you.”

“That’s nothing to do with your little game about

“I have no secrets,” said Moses gently. “And if you take my advice, you never will have. If you have no secrets, my dear, they will never be found out. If you tell your little designs, your best friends will be satisfied, and will not invent less creditable ones for you.”

“If they did, you’d talk ’em down,” said Burton roughly. “Short of a woman I never met such a hand at jaw. You’ll be in Parliament yet——” (“It is possible!” said the Jew hastily,) “with that long tongue of yours. But you haven’t told us about the boy, for all you’ve said.”