 Part 1, Chapter 1 of Tom Brown's School Days. I'm the poet of White Horse Veil, sir, with liberal notions under my cap. Ballad The Browns have become illustrious by the pen of Thackery and the pencil of Doyle, within the memory of the young gentlemen who are now matriculating at the universities. Notwithstanding the well-merited but late fame which has now fallen upon them, any one at all acquainted with the family must feel that much has yet to be written and said before the British nation will be properly sensible of how much its greatness owes to the Browns. For centuries in their quiet, dogged, homespun way they have been subduing the earth in most English counties and leaving their mark in American forests and Australian uplands. Wherever the fleets and armies of England have won renown, their stalwart sons of the Browns have done Yeoman's work. With the U. Bow and Clothyard Shaft at Cressy and Agincourt. With the Brown Bill and Pike under the brave Lord Willoughby. With Culverine and Demi-Culverine against Spaniards and Dutchmen. With hand-grenade and sabre and musket and bayonet, under Rodney and St. Vincent, Wolf and Moore, Nelson and Wellington, they have carried their lives in their hands. Being hard knocks and hard work in plenty, which was on the whole what they looked for and the best thing for them, and little praise or pudding, which indeed they, and most of us, are better without. Tolbuts and Stanleys, St. Moors and such like folk, have led armies and made laws time out of mind, but those noble families would be somewhat astounded, if the accounts ever came to be fairly taken, to find how small their work for England has been by the side of that of the Browns. These latter, indeed, have, until the present generation, rarely been sung by poet or chronicled by sage. They have wanted their say-sovates, having been too solid to rise to the top by themselves, and not having been largely gifted with the talent of catching hold of and holding on tight to whatever good things happened to be going, the foundation of the fortunes of so many noble families. But the world goes on its way, and the wheel turns, and the wrongs of the Browns, like other wrongs, seem in a fair way to get righted. And this present writer, having for many years of his life been a devout Brown worshipper, and moreover, having the honour of being nearly connected with an eminently respectable branch of the great Brown family, is anxious so far as in him lies to help the wheel over and throw his stone onto the pile. However, gentle reader, or simple reader, whichever you may be, lest you should be led to waste your precious time upon these pages, I make so bold as at once to tell you the sort of folk you'll have to meet and put up with, if you and I are to jog on comfortably together. You shall hear at once what sort of folk the Browns are, at least my branch of them, and then if you don't like the sort, why, cut the concern at once, and let you and I cry quits before either of us can grumble at the other. In the first place the Browns are a fighting family. One may question their wisdom, or wit, or beauty, but about their fight there can be no question. Wherever hard knocks of any kind, visible or invisible, are going, there the Brown who is nearest must shove in his carcass. And these carcasses, for the most part, answer very well to the characteristic propensity. They are a square-headed and snake-necked generation, broad in the shoulder, deep in the chest, and thin in the flank, carrying no lumber. Then, for clanship, they are as bad as Highlanders. It is amazing the belief they have in one another. With them there is nothing like the Browns, to the third and fourth generation. Blood is thicker than water, is one of their pet sayings. They can't be happy unless they are always meeting one another. Never were such people for family gatherings, which, were you a stranger, or sensitive, you might think had better not have been gathered together. For during the whole time of their being together they luxuriate in telling one another their minds on whatever subject turns up. And their minds are wonderfully antagonistic, and all their opinions are downright beliefs. Till you've been among them some time and understand them, you can't think but they are quarrelling. Not a bit of it. They love and respect one another ten times the more after a good-set family arguing about, and go back one to his curacy, another to his chambers, and another to his regiment, compression for work, and more than ever convinced that the Browns are the height of company. This family training, too, combined with their turn for combativeness, makes them eminently quixotic. They can't let anything alone which they think going wrong. They must speak their mind about it, annoying all easygoing folk, and spend their time and money in having a tinker at it, however hopeless the job. It is an impossibility to a Brown to leave the most disreputable lame dog on the other side of a style. Most other folk get tired of such work. The old Browns, with red faces, white whiskers, and bald heads, go on believing and fighting to a green old age. They have always a crotchet going, till the old man with the scythe reaps and garners them away for troublesome old boys as they are. But the most provoking thing is, that no failures knock them up, or make them hold their hands, or think you, or me, or other sane people in the right. Failures slide off them, like July rain offer ducks back feathers. Jem and his whole family turn out bad, and cheat them one week, and the next they are doing the same thing for Jack, and when he goes to the treadmill, and his wife and children to the work-house, they will be on the lookout for Bill to take his place. However, it is time for us to get from the general to the particular. So leaving the great army of Browns, who are scattered over the whole empire on which the sun never sets, and whose general diffusion I take to be the chief cause of that empire's stability, let us at once fix our attention upon the small nest of Browns in which our hero was hatched, and which dwelt in that portion of the Royal County of Barks, which is called the Vale of the White Horse. Most of you have probably travelled down the Great Western Railway as far as Swindon. Those of you who did so with their eyes open have been aware, soon after leaving the Didcot Station, of a fine range of chalk hills running parallel with the railway on the left-hand side as you go down, and a distance some two or three miles more or less from the line. The highest point in the range is the White Horse Hill, which you come in front of just before you stop at the Shrivenham Station. If you love English scenery, and have a few hours to spare, you can't do better the next time you pass, than stop at the Farringdon Road, or Shrivenham Station, and make your way to that highest point. And those who care for the vague old stories that haunt countryside all about England will not, if they are wise, be content with only a few hours' stay, for, glorious as the view is, the neighbourhood is yet more interesting for its relics of bygone times. I only know two English neighbourhoods thoroughly, and in each, within a circle of five miles, there is enough of interest and beauty to last any reasonable man his life. I believe this to be the case almost throughout the country, but each has a special attraction, and none can be richer than the one I am speaking of, and going to introduce you to very particularly, for on this subject I must be prosy, so those that don't care for England in any detail may skip the chapter. O young England, young England, you who are born into these racing railroad times, when there's a great exhibition, or some monster sight every year, and you can get over a couple of thousand miles of ground for three pound ten in a five weeks holiday, why don't you know more of your own birthplaces? You're all in the ends of the earth, it seems to me, as soon as you get your necks out of the educational collar, for mid summer holidays, long vacations or what not, going round Ireland with a return ticket in a fortnight, dropping your copies of Tennyson on the tops of Swiss mountains, or pulling down the Danube in Oxford racing boats, and when you get home for a quiet fortnight, you turn the steam off, and rely on your backs in the paternal garden, surrounded by the last batch of books from Moody's library, and half-bored to death. Well, well, I know it has its good side. You all pat a French more or less, and perhaps German. You have seen men and cities, no doubt, and have your opinions, such as they are, about schools of painting, high art, and all that. Have seen the pictures of Dresden and the Louvre, and know the taste of sauerkraut. All I say is, you don't know your own lanes and woods and fields. Though you may be chokeful of science, not one in twenty of you knows where to find the wood-soral or bee-orchis which grow in the next wood, or on the down three miles off, or what the bog-bean and wood-sage are good for. And as for the country legends, the stories of the old, gable-ended farm-houses, the place where the last skirmish was fought in the civil wars, where the parish-butts stood, where the last high-women turned to bay, where the last ghost was laid by the parson, there gone out of date all together. Now, in my time, when we got home by the old coach, which put us down at the crossroads with our boxes the first day of the holidays, and had been driven off by the family coachmen singing Dolce d'Ormum at the top of our voices, there we were, fixtures till black Monday came round. We had to cut out our own amusements within a walk or a ride of home, and so we got to know all the country-folk and their ways and songs and stories by heart, and went over the fields and woods and hills again and again till we made friends of them all. We were Barkshire or Gloucestershire or Yorkshire boys, and your young cosmopolites, belonging to all countries and no countries. No doubt it's all right, I dare say it is, this is the day of large views and glorious humanity and all that, but I wish Backsword Play hadn't gone out in the Vale of the White Horse, and that that confounded Great Western hadn't carried away Alfred's Hill to make an embankment. But to return to the said Vale of the White Horse, the country in which the first scenes of this true and interesting story are laid. As I said, the Great Western now runs right through it, and it is a land of large, rich pastures bounded by oxfences and covered with fine hedge-row timber, with here and there a nice little gorse or spinny, where a bideath poor Charlie, having no other cover to which to be take himself for miles and miles when pushed out some fine November morning by the old Barkshire. Those who have been there, and well-mounted, only know how he and the staunch little pack who dash after him, heads high and sterns low, with a breast-high scent, can consume the ground at such times. There being little plow-land and few woods, the Vale is only an average sporting country, except for hunting. The villages are straggling, queer, old-fashioned places, the houses being dropped down without the least regularity in nooks and out-of-the-way corners by the sides of shadowy lanes and footpaths, each with its patch of garden. They are built chiefly of good grey stone and thatched, though I see that within the last year or two the red-brick cottages are multiplying, for the Vale is beginning to manufacture largely both bricks and tiles. There are lots of waste-ground by the side of the roads in every village, amounting often to village greens, where feed the pigs and ganders of the people, and these roads are old-fashioned, homely roads, very dirty and badly made, and hardly and durable in winter, but still pleasant jog-trop roads running through the great pasture-lands, dotted here and there with little clumps of thorns, where the sleek kind are feeding, with no fence on either side of them, and a gate at the end of each field, which makes you get out of your gig, if you keep one, and gives you a chance of looking about you every quarter of a mile. One of the moralists whom we sat under in our youth, was it the great Richard Swiveller, or Mr. Stiggins, says, We are born in a Vale, and must take the consequences of being found in such a situation. These consequences I, for one, am ready to encounter. I pity people who weren't born in a Vale. I don't mean a flat country, but a Vale, that is, a flat country bounded by hills. The having your hill always in view, if you choose to turn towards him, that's the essence of a Vale. There he is, forever in the distance, your friend and companion. You never lose him as you do in hilly districts. And then what a hill is the White Horse Hill. There it stands, right up above all the rest, nine hundred feet above the sea, and the boldest, bravest shape for a chalk hill that you ever saw. Let us go up to the top of him, and see what is to be found there. I, you may well wonder and think it odd you never heard of this before, but wonder or not, as you please, there are hundreds of such things lying about England, which wiser folk than you know nothing of, and care nothing for. Yes, it's a magnificent Roman camp, and no mistake, with gates, and ditch, and mounds, all as complete as it was twenty years after the strong old rogues left it. Here, right up on the highest point, from which they say you can see eleven counties, they trenched round all the table-land, some twelve or fourteen acres, as was their custom, for they couldn't bear anybody to overlook them, and made their eerie. The ground falls away rapidly on all sides. Was there ever such turf in the whole world? You sink up to your ankles at every step, and yet the spring of it is delicious. There is always a breeze in the camp, as it is called, and here it lies just as the Romans left it, except that cairn on the east side, left by Her Majesty's core of sappers and miners the other day, when they and the engineer officer had finished their sojourn there and their surveys for the ordnance map of Berkshire. It is altogether a place that you won't forget, a place to open a man's soul, and make him prophesy, as he looks down on that great veil spread out as the Garden of the Lord before him, and wave on wave of the mysterious downs behind, and to the right and left, the chalk hills running away into the distance, along which he can trace for miles the old Roman road, the ridgeway, the rudge, as the country folk call it, keeping straight along the highest back of the hills, such a place as Balak bought Balaam to, and told him to prophesy against the people in the valley beneath, and he could not, neither shall you, for they are a people of the Lord who abide there. And now we leave the camp, and descend towards the west, and we are on the ashtown. We are treading on heroes. It is sacred ground for Englishmen, more sacred than all but one or two fields where their bones lie whitening. For this is the actual place where our Alfred won his great battle, the battle at Ashtown, ice-skendom in the chroniclers, which broke the Danish power, and made England a Christian land. The Danes held the camp and the slope where we are standing, the whole crown of the hill, in fact. The heathen had beforehand seized the higher ground, as old Assa says, having wasted everything behind them from London, and being just ready to burst down on the fair vale, Alfred's own birthplace and heritage. And up the heights came the Saxons, as they did at the Alma. The Christians led up their line from the lower ground, there stood also on that same spot a single thorn-tree, marvellous stumpy, which we ourselves with our very own eyes have seen. Bless the old chronicler! Does he think nobody ever saw the single thorn-tree but himself? Why, there it stands to this very day, just on the edge of the slope, and I saw it not three weeks since, an old single thorn-tree, marvellous stumpy, at least if it isn't the same tree it ought to have been, for it's just in the same place where the battle must have been won or lost. Around which, as I was saying, the two lines of foemen came together in battle with a huge shout, and in this place one of the two kings of the heathen and five of his earls fell down and died, and many thousands of the heathen side in the same place. After which crowning mercy the pious king that there might never be wanting a sign and a memorial to the countryside, carved out on the northern side of the chalk hill under the camp where it is almost precipitous, the great Saxon white horse, which he who will may see from the railway, and which gives its name to the vale over which it has looked these thousand years and more. Right down below the white horse is a curious deep and broad gully called the manger, into one side of which the hills fall with a series of the most lovely sweeping curves, known as the giant stairs. They are not a bit like stairs, but I never saw anything like them anywhere else, with their short green turf and tender bluebells and gosma and thistle down gleaming in the sun, and the sheep paths running along their sides like ruled lines. The other side of the manger is formed by the dragon's hill, a curious little round self-confident fellow, thrown forward from the range, utterly unlike everything round him. On this hill some deliverer of mankind, St George the country folk used to tell me, killed a dragon. Whether it were St George I cannot say, but surely a dragon was killed there, for you may see the marks yet where his blood ran down, and more by token the place where it ran down is the easiest way up the hillside. Passing along the ridgeway to the west for about a mile, we come to a little clump of young beech and firs, with a growth of thorn and privet underwood. Here you may find nests of the strong down partridge and pee-wit, but take care that the keeper isn't down upon you, and in the middle of it is an old Cromlech, a huge flat stone, raised on seven or eight others, and led up to by a path, with large single stones set up on each side. This is Whalen Smith's Cave, a piece of classic fame now, but as Sir Walter has touched it, I may as well let it alone, and refer you to Kenilworth for the legend. The thick deep wood which you see in the hollow, about a mile off, surrounds Ashdown Park, built by Inigo Jones. Four broad alleys are cut through the wood from circumference to centre, and each leads to one face of the house. The mystery of the downs hangs about house and wood, as they stand there alone, so unlike all around, with the green slopes studied with great stones, just about this part, stretching away on all sides. It was a wise Lord Craven, I think, who pitched his tent there. Passing along the ridgeway to the east, we soon come to cultivated land. The downs, strictly so called, are no more. Lincolnshire farmers have been imported, and the long fresh slopes or sheepwalks no more, but grow famous turnips and barley. One of these improvers lives over there at the Seven Barrows Farm, another mystery of the great downs. There are the Barrows still, solemn and silent, like ships in the calm sea, the sepulchres of some sons of men. But of whom? It is three miles from the White Horse, too far for the slain of Ashdown to be buried there. Who shall say what heroes are waiting there? But we must get down into the Vale again, and so away by the great rest and well-ray to town, for time and the printer's devil press, and it is a terrible long and slippery descent, and a shocking bad road. At the bottom, however, there is a pleasant public, where at we must really take a modest quencher, for the down-air is provocative of thirst. So we pull up under an old oak, which stands before the door. What is the name of your hill, landlord? Blowing St. One Hill, sir, to be sure. Reader, Stoim? Author, Stone Stupid, the Blowing Stone. And of your house I can't make out the sign. Blowing St. One, sir, says the landlord, pouring out his old ale from a Toby Fillpot jug with a melodious crash into the long-necked glass. What queer names say we, sighing at the end of our draft and holding out the glass to be replenished? Beant queer at all, sir, as I can see, sir? says my host, handing back our glass. Seeing as this here is the Blowing St. One itself, putting his hand on a square lump of stone, some three feet and a half high, perforated with two or three queer holes, like petrified anti-diluvian rat holes, which lies there close under the oak, under our very nose. We are more than ever puzzled and drink our second glass of ale, wondering what will come next. Like to ear and sir, says my host, setting down Toby Fillpot on the tray, and resting both hands on the stone. We are ready for anything, and he, without waiting for a reply, applies his mouth to one of the rat holes. Something must come out of it if he doesn't burst. Good heavens! I hope he has no apoplectic tendencies. Yes, here it comes, sure enough, a gruesome sound between a moan and a roar, and spreads itself away over the valley, and up the hillside, and into the woods at the back of the house. A ghost-like, awful voice. I'm do say, sir, says my host, rising purple-faced, while the moan is still coming out of the St. One. As they, in old times, used to warn the countryside by blowing the swan when the enemy was a-coming, and as our folks could make an ear, then, for seven-mile round. Least ways, so I've eared lawyer Smith say, and he knows a smart sight about them old times. We can hardly swallow lawyer Smith's seven miles, but could the blowing of the stone have been a summons, the sort of sending the fiery cross round the neighbourhood in the old times? What old times? Who knows? We pay for our beer and are thankful. And what's the name of the village just below, landlord? King Stone Lyle, sir. Fine plantations you've got here? Yes, sir. The squire's amazing fond of trees and such like. No wonder he's got some real beauties to be fond of. Good day, landlord. Good day, sir, and a pleasant ride to E. And now, my boys, you whom I want to get for readers, have you had enough? Will you give in at once, and say you're convinced, and let me begin my story? Or will you have more of it? Remember, I've only been over a little bit of the hillside yet. What you could ride around easily on one of your ponies in an hour. I'm only just come down into the Vale, by blowing Stone Hill, and if I once begin about the Vale, what's to stop me? You all have to hear all about Wantage, the birthplace of Alfred, and Farringdon, which held out for so long for Charles I. The Vale was near Oxford, and dreadfully malignant, full of Throgmortons, Pusies, and Pies, and such like, and their brawny retainers. Did you ever read Thomas Ingoldsby's Legend of Hamilton Tie? If you haven't, you ought to have. Well, Farringdon is where he lived, before he went to sea. His real name was Hamden Pie, and the Pies were the great folk at Farringdon. Then there's Pusie. You've heard of the Pusie Horn, which King Canute gave to the Pusies of that day, and which the gallant old squire, lately gone to his rest, whom the Berkshire Freeholders turned out of last Parliament to their eternal disgrace for voting according to his conscience. Used to bring out on high days, holidays, and bonfire nights. And the splendid old Cross Church at Uffington, the Uffingust town. How the whole countryside teams with Saxon names and memories, and the old moated Grange at Compton, nestled close under the hillside, where twenty Marianas may have lived, with its bright water lilies in the moat, and its ewe walk, the cloister walk, and its peerless terraced gardens. There they all are, and twenty things beside, for those who care about them and have eyes. And these are the sorts of things you may find, I believe, every one of you in any common English country neighbourhood. Will you look for them under your own noses, or will you not? Well, well, I've done what I can to make you, and if you will go gadding over half Europe now, every holidays, I can't help it. I was born and bred a West Country man, thank God, a Wessex man, a citizen of the noblest Saxon kingdom of Wessex, a regular angular Saxon, the very soul of me at Scriptus Glebi. There's nothing like the old countryside for me, and no music like the twang of the real old Saxon tongue, as one gets it fresh from the veritable chore in the White Horse Vale, and I say with Gage Riddler, the old West Country yeoman. Through all the wild old Gage would boast, commend me to merry old England most, while vulgar's braating, vor and I, we swaps at home, my dog and I. Here, at any rate, lived and stopped at home Squire Brown, J.P. for the county of Barks, in a village near the foot of the White Horse Range, and here he dealt out justice and mercy in a rough way, and begat sons and daughters, and hunted the fox, and grumbled at the badness of the roads and the times, and his wife dealt out stockings and calico shirts and smock frocks and comforting drinks to the old folks with the rumities, and good counsel to all, and kept the coal and clothes clubs going, for yuletide, when the bands of mummers came round, dressed out in ribbons and coloured paper caps, and stamped round the Squire's kitchen, repeating in true sing-song vernacular the legend of St George and his fight, and the ten-pound doctor who pays his part at Healing the Saint, a relic, I believe, of the old Middle Age mysteries. It was the first dramatic representation which greeted the eyes of little Tom, who was brought down into the kitchen by his nurse to witness it, at the mature age of three years. Tom was the eldest child of his parents, and from his earliest babyhood exhibited the family characteristics in great strength. He was a hearty strong boy from the first, given to fighting with and escaping from his nurse, and fraternizing with all the village boys, with whom he made expeditions all round the neighbourhood. And here, in the quiet old-fashioned country village, under the shadow of the everlasting hills, Tom Brown was reared, and never left it till he went first to school, when nearly eight years of age. For in those days, change of air twice a year was not thought absolutely necessary for the health of all Her Majesty's leeches. I have been credibly informed, and am inclined to believe, that the various boards of directors of railway companies, those gigantic jobbers and bribers, while quarrelling about everything else, agreed together some ten years back to buy up the learned profession of medicine, body and soul. To this end they set apart several millions of money, which they continually distribute judiciously among the doctors, stipulating only this one thing, that they shall prescribe change of air to every patient who can pay, or borrow money to pay, a railway fare, and see their prescription carried out. If it be not for this, why is it that none of us can be well at home for a year together? It wasn't so twenty years ago, not a bit of it. The Browns didn't go out of the country once in five years. A visit to Redding or Abingdon twice a year, at asaisies or quarter-sessions, which the squire made on his horse with a pair of saddlebags containing his wardrobe, a stay of a day or two at some country-neighbours, or an expedition to a county ball or the yeomanry review made up the sum of the Browns' locomotion in most years. A stray Brown from some distant county dropped in every now and then, or from Oxford, on Grave Nag, an old Don, contemporary of the squire, and were looked upon by the Brown household and the villagers with the same sort of feeling with which we now regard a man who has crossed the Rocky Mountains, or launched a boat on the Great Lake in Central Africa. The White Horse Vale, remember, was traversed by no great road. Nothing but country parish roads, and these very bad. Only one coach ran there, and this one only from Wantage to London, so that the western part of the Vale was without regular means of moving on, and certainly didn't seem to want them. There was the canal, by the way, which supplied the countryside with coal, and up and down which continually went the long barges, with the big black men lounging by the side of the horses along the towing-path, and the women in bright-coloured handkerchiefs standing in the sterns, steering. Standing, I say, but you could never see whether they were standing or sitting, all but their heads and shoulders being out of sight in the cosy little cabins which occupied some eight feet of the stern, and which Tom Brown pictured himself as the most desirable of residences. His nurse told him that these good-natured-looking women were in the constant habit of enticing children into the barges, and taking them up to London and selling them, which Tom wouldn't believe, and which made him resolve as soon as possible to accept the off-profit invitation of these sirens to a young master to come in and have a ride, but as yet the nurse was too much for Tom. Yet why should I, after all, abuse the gadabout propensities of my countrymen? We are a vagabond nation now that's certain for better for worse. I am a vagabond. I have been away from home no less than five distinct times in the last year. The Queen sets us the example. We are moving on from top to bottom. Little Dirty Jack, who abides in Clements Inn Gateway, and blacks my boots for a penny, takes his months hot-picking every year as a matter of course. Why shouldn't he? I'm delighted at it. I love vagabonds, only I prefer poor to rich ones. Couriers and ladies-maids, imperials and travelling carriages are an abomination unto me. I cannot away with them. But for Dirty Jack and every good fellow who, in the words of the capital French song, moves about, comme le limaçant, portant tout son bagage, c'est meuble sa maison, on his own back. Why, good luck to them, and many a merry roadside adventure, and steaming supper in the chimney-corners of roadside inns, Swiss chalets, hot and hot crawls, or wherever else they like to go. So, having succeeded in contradicting myself in my first chapter, which gives me great hopes that you will all go on and think me a good fellow, notwithstanding my crotchets, I shall hear shut up for the present, and consider my ways, having resolved to saut it out, as we say in the Vale, Olus bolus, just as it comes, and then you'll probably get the truth out of me. End of Part 1, Chapter 1. Part 1, Chapter 2 of Tom Brown's School Days. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by IC Jumbo. Tom Brown's School Days, by Thomas Hughes. Part 1. Chapter 2, The Beast. And the King, Commandeth, and Forbideth, that from henceforth neither fares nor markets be kept in churchards, for the honour of the church. Statutes. Thirteen Edward. One Statute. Two Cap. Six. As that venerable and learned poet, whose voluminous works we all think it the correct thing to admire and talk about, but don't read often, most truly says, The child is father to the man. A fortiori, therefore, he must be father to the boy. So as we are going at any rate to see Tom Brown through his boyhood, supposing we never get any father, which, if you show a proper sense of the value of this history, there is no knowing but what we may, let us have a look at the life and environments of the child in the quiet country village to which we were introduced in the last chapter. Tom, as has already been said, was a robust and combative urchin, and at the age of four began to struggle against the yoke and authority of his nurse. That functionery was a good-hearted, tearful, scatterbrained girl, lately taken by Tom's mother, Madame Brown, as she was called, from the village school to be trained as nurserymaid. Madame Brown was a rare trainer of servants, and spent herself freely in the profession, for profession it was, and gave her more trouble by half than many people take to earn a good income. Her servants were known and sought after for miles round. Almost all the girls who attained a certain place in the village school were taken by her, one or two at a time, as housemaids, laundrymaids, nurserymaids, or kitchenmaids, and after a year or two's training were started in life amongst the neighbouring families, with good principles and wardrobes. One of the results of this system was the perpetual despair of Mrs Brown's cook and own maid, who no sooner had a notable girl made to their hands than Mrs was sure to find a good place for her and send her off, taking in fresh importations from the school. Another was that the house was always full of young girls, with clean, shining faces, who broke plates and scorched linen, but made an atmosphere of cheerful, homely life about the place, good for everyone who came within its influence. Mrs Brown loved young people, and in fact human creatures in general, above plates and linen. They were more like a lot of elder children than servants, and felt to her more as a mother or aunt than as a mistress. Tom's nurse was one who took in her instruction very slowly. She seemed to have two left hands and no head, and so Mrs Brown kept her on longer than usual, that she might expend her awkwardness and forgetfulness upon those who would not judge and punish her too strictly for them. Charity Lamb was her name. It had been the immemorial habit of the village to christen children, either by Bible names or by those of the cardinal and other virtues, so that one was forever hearing in the village street or on the green shrill sounds of Prudence, Prudence, they come out of the gutter, or Mercy, drop that girl, what beast are you doing with little faith? And there were Ruths, Rachel's, Kezia's in every corner. The same with the boys, they were Benjamin's, Jacobs, Noah's, Enoch's. I suppose the custom has come down from Puritan times. There it is, at any rate, very strong still in the veil. Well, from early morn till dewy eve, when she had it out of him in the cold tub before putting him to bed, Charity and Tom were pitted against one another. Physical power was as yet on the side of Charity, but she hadn't a chance with him wherever headwork was wanted. This war of independence began every morning before breakfast, when Charity escorted her charge to a neighbouring farmhouse, which supplied the browns, and where, by his mother's wish, Master Tom went to drink whey before breakfast. Tom had no sort of objection to whey, but he had a decided liking for curds, which were forbidden as unwholesome. And there was seldom a morning that he did not manage to secure a handful of hard curds in defiance of Charity and of the farmer's wife. The latter good soul was a gaunt, angular woman, who, with an old black bonnet on the top of her head, the strings dangling about her shoulders, and her gown tucked through her pocket-holes, went clattering about the dairy, cheese-room, and yard in high patterns. Charity was some sort of niece of the old ladies, and was consequently free of the farmhouse and garden into which she could not resist going for the purposes of gossip and flirtation with the heir apparent, who was a dawdling fellow, never out at work as he ought to have been. The moment Charity had found her cousin, or any other occupation, Tom would slip away, and in a minute shrill cries would be heard from the dairy. Charity! Charity! The lazy Aussie! We're best! And Tom would break cover, hands and mouth full of curds, and take refuge on the shaky surface of the great muck reservoir in the middle of the yard, disturbing the repose of the great pigs. Here he was in safety, as no grown person could follow without getting over their knees, and the luckless Charity, while her aunt scolded her from the dairy door for being Alice Hankeren about after our William, instead of minding Master Tom, would descend from threats to coaxing, to lure Tom out of the muck, which was rising over his shoes, and would soon tell a tale on his stockings, for which she would be sure to catch it from Mrs's maid. Tom had two abetters, in the shape of a couple of old boys, Noah and Benjamin by name, who defended him from Charity, and expended much time upon his education. They were both of them retired servants of former generations of the Browns. Noah Crook was a keen, dry old man of almost 90, but still able to totter about. He talked to Tom, quite as if he were one of his own family, and indeed had long completely identified the Browns with himself. In some remote age he had been an attendant of a Miss Brown, and had conveyed her about the country on a pillion. He had a little round picture of the identical grey horse, comparisoned with the identical pillion, before which he used to do a sort of fetish worship, and abused turnpike roads and carriages. He wore an old full-bottomed wig, the gift of some dandy old Brown whom he had valeted in the middle of last century, which habiliment Master Tom looked upon with considerable respect, not to say fear, and indeed his whole feeling towards Noah was strongly tainted with awe. And when the old gentleman was gathered to his father's, Tom's lamentation over him was not unaccompanied by a certain joy at having seen the last of the wig. Poor old Noah, dead and gone, said he. Tom Brown, so sorry. Put him in the coffin, wig and all. But old Benji was young Master's real delight and refuge. He was a youth by the side of Noah, scarce seventy years old, a cheery, humorous, kind-hearted old man, full of sixty years of veil gossip, and of all sorts of helpful ways for young and old, but above all for children. It was he who bent the first pin with which Tom extracted his first stickle-back out of Pebbly Brook, the little stream which ran through the village. The first stickle-back was a splendid fellow, with fabulous red and blue gills. Tom kept him in a small basin till the day of his death, and became a fisherman from that day. Within a month from the taking of the first stickle-back, Benji had carried off our hero to the canal in defiance of charity, and between them, after a whole afternoon's pop-joying, they had caught three or four small coarse fish, and a perch, averaging perhaps two and a half ounces each, which Tom bore home in rapture to his mother as a precious gift, and which she received like a true mother with equal rapture, instructing the cook, nevertheless, in a private interview, not to prepare the same for the squire's dinner. Charity had appealed against old Benji in the meantime, representing the dangers of the canal banks, but Mrs. Brown, seeing the boys in aptitude for female guidance, had decided in Benji's favour, and from thence forth the old man was Tom's dry nurse, and as they sat by the canal, watching their little green and white float, Benji would instruct him in the doings of deceased Browns. How his grandfather, in the early days of the Great War, when there was much distress and crime in the Vale, and the magistrates had been threatened by the mob, had ridden in with a big stick in his hand, and held the petty sessions by himself. How his great uncle, the Rector, had encountered and laid the last ghost, who had frightened the old women, male and female, of the parish, out of their senses, and who turned out to be the blacksmith's apprentice, disguised in drink and a white sheet. It was Benji, too, who saddled Tom's first pony, and instructed him in the mysteries of horsemanship, teaching him to throw his weight back and keep his hand low, and who stood chuckling outside the door of the girl's school when Tom rode his little Shetland into the cottage and round the table, where the old dame and her pupils were seated at their work. Benji himself was come of a family distinguished in the Vale for their prowess in all athletic games. Some half-dozen of his brothers and kinsmen had gone to the wars, of whom only one had survived to come home with a small pension and three bullets in different parts of his body. He had shared Benji's cottage till his death, and had left him his old dragoons, sword and pistol, which hung over the mantelpiece, flanked by a pair of heavy single-sticks with which Benji himself had won renown long ago as an old game-ster against the picked men of Wiltshire and Somersetcher in many a good bout at the revels and pastimes of the countryside. For he had been a famous back-swordman in his young days and a good wrestler at Elbow and Collar. Back-swording and wrestling were the most serious holiday pursuits for the Vale, those by which men attained fame, and each village had its champion. I suppose that, on the whole, people were less worked then than they are now. At any rate, they seemed to have more time and energy for the old pastimes. The great times for back-swording came round once a year in each village, at the feast. The Vale-Veasts were not the common statute-feasts, but much more ancient business. They are literally, so far as one can ascertain, feasts of the dedication. That is, they were first established in the churchyard on the day on which the village church was opened for public worship, which was on the wake or festival of the patron saint, and have been held on the same day in every year since that time. There was no longer any remembrance of why the feast had been instituted, but nevertheless it had a pleasant and almost sacred character of its own, for it was then that all the children of the village, wherever they were scattered, tried to get home for a holiday to visit their fathers and mothers and friends, bringing with them their wages or some little gift from up the country for the old folk. Perhaps for a day or two before, but at any rate on feast day, and the day after, in our village, you might see strapping healthy young men and women from all parts of the country going round from house to house in their best clothes, and finishing up with a call on Madame Brown, whom they would consult as to putting out their earnings to best advantage, or how best to expend the same for the benefit of the old folk. Every household, however poor, managed to raise a feast cake, and a bottle of ginger or raisin wine, which stood on the cottage table ready for all comers, and not unlikely to make them remember feast time, for feast cake is very solid, and full of huge raisins. Moreover, feast time was the day of reconciliation for the parish. If Job Higgins and Noah Freeman hadn't spoken for the last six months, their old women would be sure to get it patched up by that day, and though there was a good deal of drinking and low vice in the booths of an evening, it was pretty well confined to those who would have been doing the like, feast or no feast, and on the whole the effect was humanizing and Christian. In fact, the only reason why this is not the case still is that gentle folk and farmers have taken to other amusements and have, as usual, forgotten the poor. They don't attend the feasts themselves and call them disreputable, whereupon the steadiest of the poor leave them also, and they become what they are called. Class amusements, be they for dukes or ploughboys, always become nuisances and curses to a country. The true charm of cricket and hunting is that they are still more or less sociable and universal. There's a place for every man who will come and take his part. No one in the village enjoyed the approach of Viste, more than Tom, in the year in which he was taken under old Benji's tutelage. The feast was held in a large green field at the lower end of the village. The road to Farringdon ran along one side of it, and the brook by the side of the road, and above the brook was another large, gentle, sloping pastureland, with a footpath running down it from the churchyard, and the old church, the originator of all the mirth, towered up with its grey walls and lancet windows, overlooking and sanctioning the whole, though its own share therein had been forgotten. At the point where the footpath crossed the brook and road, and entered on the field where the feast was held, was a long, low roadside inn, and on the opposite side of the field was a large, white, thatched farmhouse, where dwelt an old sporting farmer, a great promoter of the revels. Past the old church and down the footpath potted the old man and the child, hand in hand, early on the afternoon of the day before the feast, and wandered all round the ground, which was already being occupied by the cheap jacks, with their green-covered carts and marvellous assortments of wares, and the booths of more legitimate small traders, with their tempting arrays of fairings and eatables, and penny-peep shows, and other shows containing pink-eyed ladies and dwarfs, and boa constrictors, and wild Indians. But the object of most interest to Benji, and of course to his pupil also, was the stage of rough planks some four feet high, which was being put up by the village carpenter for the back-sorting and wrestling. And after surveying the whole tenderly, old Benji led his charge away to the roadside inn, where he ordered a glass of ale and a long pipe for himself, and discussed these unwonted luxuries on the bench outside in the soft evening with mine-host, another old servant of the Browns, and speculated with him on the likelihood of a good show of old game-sters to contend for the morrow's prizes, and told tales of the gallant bouts of forty years back, to which Tom listened with all his ears and eyes. But who shall tell the joy of the next morning, when the church bells were ringing a merry peal, and old Benji appeared in the servants' hall, resplendent in a long blue coat and brass buttons, and a pair of old yellow buck-skins and top-boots which he had cleaned for and inherited from Tom's grandfather, a stout thorn-stick in his hand, and a nose-gay of pinks and lavender in his buttonhole, and led away Tom in his best clothes, and two new shillings in his britches' pockets. Those, too, at any rate, look like enjoying the day's revel. They quicken their pace when they get into the churchyard, for already they see the field thronged with country folk, the men in clean white smocks or velveteen or fustion coats, with rough plush waistcoats of many colours, and the women in the beautiful long scarlet cloak, the usual outdoor dress of West Country women in those days, and which often descended in families from mother to daughter, or in new-fashioned stuffed shawls which, if they would but believe it, don't become them half so well. The air resounds with the pipe and table, and the drums and trumpets of the showmen shouting at the doors of their caravans, over which tremendous pictures of the wonders to be seen hang temptingly, while through all rises the shrill root-toot-toot of Mr. Punch and the unceasing panpipe of his satellite. Lorca Massey, Mr. Benjamin, cries a stout motherly woman in a red cloak as they enter the field, be that you? Well, I never! You do look purely. And how's the squire, and madam, and the family? Benji graciously shakes hands with the speaker, who has left our village for some years, but has come over for a feast-day on a visit to an old gossip, and gently indicates the heir apparent of the browns. Bless his little heart! I must give you a kiss. Here, Susanna! Susanna! Christ she, raising herself from the embrace, come and see Mr. Benjamin, a young master Tom. You mind our Suki, Mr. Benjamin? She begrowed up a rare slip of a wench since you've seen her, though her old B-16 come Martin, Mass. I do aim to take her to see madam to get her a place. And Suki comes bouncing away from a knot of old school-fellows, and drops a curtsy to Mr. Benjamin, and elders come up from all parts to salute Benji, and girls who have been madam's pupils to kiss master Tom, and they carry him off to load him with fairings, and he returns to Benji his hat and coat covered with ribbons, and his pockets crammed with wonderful boxes which open upon ever-new boxes, and pop-guns, and trumpets, and apples, and gilt gingerbread from the stall of Angel Heaven's sole vendor thereof, whose booth groans with kings and queens, and elephants, and prancing steeds, all gleaming with gold. There was more gold on Angel's cakes than there is ginger in those of this degenerate age. Skilled diggers might yet make a fortune in the church-yards of the Vale, by carefully washing the dust of the consumers of Angel's gingerbread. Alas, he is with his namesakes, and his receipts have, I fear, died with him. And then they inspect the penny-peep-show, or at least some does, while old Benji stands outside and gossips and walks up the steps, and enters the mysterious doors of the pink-eyed lady and the Irish giant, who do not by any means come up to their pictures, and the bower will not swallow his rabbit, but there the rabbit is, waiting to be swallowed. And what can you expect for tuppence? We are easily pleased in the Vale. Now there is a rush of the crowd, and a tinkling bell is heard, and shouts of laughter, and Master Tom mounts on Benji's shoulders, and beholds a jingling match in all its glory. The games are begun, and this is the opening of them. It is a quaint game, immensely amusing to look at, and as I don't know whether it is used in your counties, I had better describe it. A large, roped ring is made, into which are introduced a dozen or so of big boys and young men who mean to play. These are carefully blinded, and turned loose into the ring. And then a man is introduced, not blindfolded, with a bell hung round his neck, and his two hands tied behind him. Of course, every time he moves the bell must ring, as he has no hand to hold it, and so the dozen blind-folded men have to catch him. This they cannot always manage if he is a lively fellow, but half of them always rush into the arms of the other half, or drive their heads together, or tumble over, and then the crowd laughs vehemently, and invents nicknames for them on the spur of the moment. And they, if they be choleric, tear off the handkerchiefs which blind them, and not unfrequently pitch into one another, each thinking that the other must have run against him on purpose. It is great fun to look at a jingling match, certainly, and Tom shouts and jumps on old Benji's shoulders at the sight, until the old man feels weary, and shifts him to the strong young shoulders of the groom who has just got down to the fun. And now, while they are climbing the pole in another part of the field, and muscling in a flower-tub in another, the old farmer whose house, as has been said, overlooks the field, and who is master of the revels, gets up the steps onto the stage, and announces to all whom it may concern that a half-sovereign in money will be forthcoming to the old gangster who breaks most heads, through which the squire and he have added a new hat. The amount of the prize is sufficient to stimulate the men of the immediate neighbourhood, but not enough to bring any very high talent from a distance. So, after a glance or two round, a tall fellow, who is a down shepherd, chucks his hat onto the stage, and climbs up the steps, looking rather sheepish. The crowd, of course, first cheer, and then chaff as usual, as he picks up his hat, and begins handling the sticks to see which will suit him. Why, Willem Smith, the Kant's play-wee, our day! says his companion to the Blacksmith's apprentice, a stout young fellow of nineteen or twenty. Willem Sweetheart is in the feast somewhere, and has strictly enjoined him not to get his head broke at back-sorting, on pain of her highest displeasure, but as she is not to be seen, the women pretend not to like to see the back-sort play and keep away from the stage, and as his hat is decidedly getting old, he chucks it onto the stage, and follows himself, hoping that he will only have to break other people's heads, or that, after all, Rachel won't really mind. Then follows the greasy cap lined with fur of a half gypsy, poaching, loafing fellow, who travels the Vale for not much good, I fancy. For twenty times was Peter feared for once that Peter was respected, in fact. And then three or four other hats, including the glossy caster of Joe Willis, the self-elected and would-be champion of the neighbourhood, a well-to-do young butcher of twenty-eight or thereabouts, and a great strapping fellow, with his full allowance of bluster. This is a capital show of game-sters, considering the amount of the prize. So, while they are picking their sticks and drawing their lots, I think I must tell you, as shortly as I can, how the noble old game of Baxord is played, for it is sadly gone out of late, even in the Vale, and maybe you have never seen it. The weapon is a good stout ash-stick, with a large basket handle, heavier and somewhat shorter than a common single-stick. The players are called old game-sters, why, I cannot tell you, and their object is simply to break one another's heads, for the moment that blood runs an inch anywhere above the eyebrow, the old game-ster to whom it belongs is beaten, and has to stop. A very slight blow with the sticks will fetch blood, so that it is by no means a punishing pastime, if the men don't play on purpose and savagely at the body and arms of their adversaries. The old game-ster going into action only takes off his hat and coat, and arms himself with a stick. He then loops the fingers of his left hand in a handkerchief or strap, which he fastens round his left leg, measuring the length, so that when he draws it tight with his left elbow in the air, that elbow shall just reach as high as his crown. Thus, you see, so long as he chooses to keep his left elbow up, regardless of cuts, he has a perfect guard for the left side of his head, and then he advances his right hand above and in front of his head, holding his stick across, so that its point projects an inch or two over his left elbow, and thus his whole head is completely guarded, and he faces his man armed in like manner, and they stand some three feet apart, often nearer and faint and strike, and return at one another's heads, until one cries hold, or blood flows. In the first case they are allowed a minute's time, and go on again. In the latter another pair of game-sters are called on. If good men are playing, the quickness of the returns is marvellous. You hear the rattle like that a boy makes drawing his stick along palings, only heavier, and the closeness of the men in action to one another gives it a strange interest, and makes a spell at back-sorting a very noble sight. They are all suited now with sticks, and Joe Willis and the Gypsy man have drawn the first lot, so the rest lean against the rails of the stage, and Joe and the Dark Man meet in the middle, the boards having been strewn with sawdust. Joe's white shirt and spotless drab britches and boots, contrasting with the Gypsy's coarse blue shirt, and dirty green velveteen britches and leather gaiters. Joe is evidently turning up his nose at the other, and half insulted at having to break his head. The Gypsy is a tough, active fellow, but not very skillful with his weapon, so that Joe's weight and strength tell in a minute. He is too heavy metal for him. Wack, whack, whack! come his blows, breaking down the Gypsy's guard, and threatening to reach his head every moment. There it is at last. Blood, blood! shout the spectators, as a thin stream oozes out slowly from the roots of his hair, and the umpire calls them to stop. The Gypsy scowls at Joe under his brows in no pleasant manner, while Master Joe swaggeres about, and makes attitudes, and thinks himself, and shows that he thinks himself the greatest man in the field. Then follow several stout sets to between the other candidates for the new hat, and at last come the Shepard and Willem Smith. This is the crack set to of the day. They are both in famous wind, and there is no crying hold. The Shepard is an old hand, and up to all the dodges. He tries them one after another, and very nearly gets at Willem's head by coming in near and playing over his guard at the half-stick. But somehow Willem blunders through, catching the stick on his shoulders, neck, sides, every now and then, anywhere but on his head. And his returns are heavy and straight, and he is the youngest gamester, and a favourite in the parish, and his gallant stand brings down shouts and cheers, and the knowing ones think he'll win if he keeps steady. And Tom, on the groom's shoulder, holds his hands together, and can hardly breathe for excitement. Alas for Willem, his sweetheart, getting tired of female companionship, has been hunting the booth to see where he can have got to, and now catches sight of him on the stage in full combat. She flushes and turns pale. Her old aunt catches hold of her, saying, Bless ye, child, don't ye go against it? But she breaks away and runs towards the stage, calling his name. Willem keeps up his guard stoutly, but glances for a moment towards the voice. No guard will do it, Willem, without the eye. The shepherd steps round and strikes, and the point of his stick just grazes Willem's forehead, fetching off the skin, and the blood flows, and the umpire cries hold, and Paul Willem's chance is up for the day. But he takes it very well, and puts on his old hat and coat, and goes down to be scolded by his sweetheart, and led away out of mischief. Tom hears him say coaxingly as he walks off. No don't ye, Rachel, I wouldn't have done it, only I wanted some at the baye a fairing with, and I'd be as flush of money as a twad of feathers. Neem, mind what I tell thee that rejoins Rachel sorsily, and don't ye keep blethering about fairings? Tom resolves in his heart to give Willem the remainder of his two shillings after the backsawding. Joe Willis has all the luck today. His next bout ends in an easy victory, while the shepherd has a tough job to break his second head. And when Joe and the shepherd meet, and the whole circle expect, and hope to see him get a broken crown, the shepherd slips in the first round and falls against the rails, hurting himself so that the old farmer will not let him go on, much as he wishes to try. And that imposter Joe, for he is certainly not the best man, struts and swagger about the stage, the conquering gamester, though he hasn't had five minutes really try and play. Joe takes the new hat in his hand, and puts the money into it, and then, as if a thought strikes him, and he doesn't think his victory quite acknowledged down below, walks to each face of the stage, and looks down, shaking the money and chaffing, as how he'll stake hat, and money, and another half-sovereign, again any gamester has hasn't played already. Cunning Joe, he thus gets rid of Willem and the shepherd, who is quite fresh again. No one seems to like the offer, and the umpire is just coming down when a queer old hat, something like a doctor of divinity's shovel, is chucked onto the stage, and an elderly quiet man steps out, who has been watching the play, saying he should like to cross a stick with a prodigalish young chap. The crowd cheer, and begin to chaff Joe, who turns up his nose and swagger's across to the sticks. Inbid an old boss-bird, says he, I'll break the bald head on and to the truth. The old boy is very bald, certainly, and the blood will show fast enough, if you can touch him, Joe. He takes off his long-flapped coat, and stands up in a long-flapped waistcoat, which Sir Roger Decoverly might have worn when it was new, picks out a stick, and is ready for Master Joe, who loses no time, but begins his old game, whack, whack, whack, trying to break down the old man's guard by sheer strength. But it won't do, he catches every blow close by the basket, and though he is rather stiff in his returns, after a minute walks Joe about the stage, and is clearly a staunch old game-ster. Joe now comes in, and making the most of his height, tries to get over the old man's guard at half-stick, by which he takes a smart blow in the ribs, and another on the elbow, and nothing more. And now he loses wind, and begins to puff, and the crowd laugh. Cry, old Joe, least met thy match. Instead of taking the good advice and getting his wind, Joe loses his temper, and strikes at the old man's body. Blood, blood! shout the crowd. Joe's head's broke. Who'd have thought it? How did it come? That body blow left Joe's head unguarded for a moment, and with one turn of the wrist the old gentleman has picked a neat little bit of skin off the middle of his forehead, and though he won't believe it, and hammers on for three more blows despite of the shouts, is then convinced by the blood trickling into his eye. Poor Joe is sadly crestfallen, and fumbles in his pocket for the other half sovereign. But the old game-ster won't have it. Keep thy money, man, and giz thy hand, says he, and they shake hands. But the old game-ster gives the new hat to the shepherd, and soon after the half-sovereign to Willem, who thereout decorates his sweet heart with ribbons to his heart's content. Who can I be? Where do I come from? asks the crowd, and it soon flies about that the old West Country champion, who played a tie with sure the life-guardsman at Vizes twenty years before, has broken Joe Willis' crown for him. How my country fair is spinning out! I see I must skip the wrestling, and the boys jumping in sacks, and rolling wheel-barrows blindfolded, and the donkey-race, and the fight which arose thereout, marring the otherwise peaceful feast, and the frightened scurrying away of the female feast-goers and dissent of Squire Brown, summoned by the wife of one of the combatants to stop it, which he wouldn't start to do till he had got on his top boots. Tom is carried away by old Benjy, dog-tired and surfited with pleasure, as the evening comes on, and the dancing begins in the booths. And though Willem and Rachel in her new ribbons, and many another good lad and lass, don't come away just yet, but have a good step out, and enjoy it, and get no harm thereby, yet we, being sober folk, will just stroll away, up through the church-yard, and by the old yew-tree, and get a quiet dish of tea and a parley with our gossips, as the steady ones of our village do, and so to bed. That's the fair, true sketch, as far as it goes, of one of the larger village feasts in the Vale of Barks, when I was a little boy. They are much altered for the worse, I am told. I haven't been at one of these twenty years, but I have been at the statute fairs in some west country towns, where servants are hired, and greater abominations cannot be found. What village feasts have come to, I fear, in many cases, may be read in the pages of yeast, though I never saw one so bad, thank God. Do you want to know why? It is because, as I said before, gentle folk and farmers have left off joining, or taking an interest in them. They don't either subscribe to the prizes, or go down and enjoy the fun. Is this a good or a bad sign? I hardly know. Bad, sure enough, if it only arises from the further separation of classes consequent on twenty years of buying cheap and selling dear, and its accompanying overwork, or because our sons and daughters have their hearts in London club life, or so-called society, instead of in the old English home duties, because farmer's sons are aping fine gentleman, and farmer's daughters caring more to make bad foreign music than good English cheeses. Good, perhaps, if it be that the time for the old feast has gone by, that it is no longer the healthy sound expression of English country holiday-making, that in fact we, as a nation, have got beyond it, and are in a transition state, feeling for, and soon likely to find, some better substitute. Only I have just got this to say before I quit the text. Don't let reformers of any sort think that they are going really to lay hold of the working boys and young men of England by any educational grappinal whatever, which isn't some bona fide equivalent for the games of the old country feast in it. Something to put in the place of the backsawding and wrestling and racing. Something to try the muscles of men's bodies, and the endurance of their hearts, and to make them rejoice in their strength. In all the newfangled, comprehensive plans which I see, this is all left out, and the consequence is that your great mechanics institutes end in intellectual priggism, and your Christian young men's societies in religious phariseism. Well, well, we must bide our time. Life isn't all beer and skittles, but beer and skittles, or something better of the same sort, must form a good part of every Englishman's education. If I could only drive this into the heads of you rising parliamentary lords and young swells who have your ways made for you, as the saying is, you who frequent palaver-houses and west-end clubs, waiting always ready to strap yourselves on the back of the poor, dear old John, as soon as the present used up lot, your fathers and uncles, who sit there on the great parliamentary majority's pack-saddle, and make believe they're guiding him with their red-tape bridle. Tumble or have to be lifted off. I don't think much of you yet, and wish I could, though you do go talking and lecturing up and down the country to crowded audiences, and are busy with all sorts of philanthropic intellectualism, and circulating libraries, and museums, and heaven only knows what besides, and try to make us think, through newspaper reports, that you are, even as we, of the working classes. But, bless your hearts, we ain't so green though lots of us of all sorts toadie you enough, certainly, and try to make you think so. I'll tell you what to do now. Instead of all this trumpeting and fuss, which is only the old parliamentary majority dodge over again, just you go, each of you, you've plenty of time for it if you'll only give up to the line, and quickly make three or four friends, real friends, among us. You'll find a little trouble in getting at the right sort, because such birds don't come lightly to your lure, but found they may be. Take, say, two out of the professions, lawyer, parson, doctor, which you will, one out of trade, and three or four out of the working classes, tailors, engineers, carpenters, engravers. There's plenty of choice. Let them be men of your own age's mind, and ask them to your homes. Introduce them to your wives and sisters, and get introduced to theirs. Give them good dinners, and talk to them about what is really at the bottom of your hearts, and box, and run, and row with them when you have a chance. Do all this honestly as man to man, and by the time you come to ride, old John, you'll be able to do something more than sit on his back, and may feel his mouth with some stronger bridle than a red tape one. Ah, if only you would. But you have got too far out of the right ruck, I fear. Too much over civilisation, and the deceitfulness of riches. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. More's the pity. I never came across but two of you who could value a man wholly and solely for what was in him, who thought themselves verily and indeed of the same flesh and blood as John Jones the attorney's clerk, and Bill Smith the costamunger, and could act as if they thought so. End of part one, chapter two. Part one, chapter three of Tom Brown's school days. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Icy Jumbo Tom Brown's school days by Thomas Hughes. Part one, chapter three. Sundry Wars and Alliances. Poor old Benjy. The rheumatism has much to answer for all through English countryside, but it never played a scurvia trick than in laying thee by the heels when thou wast yet in a green old age. The enemy which had long been carrying on a sort of border warfare and trying his strength against Benjy's on the battlefield of his hands and legs, now mustering all his forces began laying siege to the citadel and overrunning the whole country. Benjy was seized in the back and loins, and though he made strong and brave fight it was soon clear enough that all which could be beaten of poor old Benjy would have to give in before long. It was as much as he could do now, with the help of his big stick and frequent stops, to hobble down to the canal with Master Tom and bait his hook for him, and sit and watch his angling, telling him quaint old country stories. And when Tom had no sport, and detecting a rat some hundred yards or so off along the bank, would rush off with Toby the turnspit terrier, his other faithful companion, in bootless pursuit, he might have tumbled in and been drowned twenty times over before Benjy could have got near him. Cheery and unmindful of himself as Benjy was, this loss of locomotive power bothered him greatly. He had got a new object in his old age, and was just beginning to think himself useful again in the world. He feared much, too, lest Master Tom should fall back again into the hands of charity and the women. So he tried everything he could think of to get set up. He even went an expedition to the dwelling of one of those queer mortals who, say what we will, and reason how we will, do cure simple people of diseases of one kind or another without the aid of physics, and so get to themselves the reputation of using charms, and inspire for themselves and their dwellings great respect, not to say fear amongst a simple folk such as the dwellers in the veil of the white horse. Where this power, or whatever else it may be, descends upon the shoulders of a man whose ways are not straight, he becomes a nuisance to the neighbourhood, a receiver of stolen goods, giver of love-potions, and a deceiver of silly women, the avowed enemy of law and order, of justices of the peace, head-burrers, and gamekeepers. Such a man, in fact, as was recently caught tripping and deservedly dealt with by the lead's justices, for seducing a girl who had come to him to get back a faithless lover, and has been convicted of bigamy since then. Sometimes, however, they are of quite a different stamp, men who pretend to nothing and are with difficulty persuaded to exercise their occult arts in the simplest cases. Of this latter sort was old Farmer Ives, as he was called, the wise man to whom Benjy resorted, taking Tom with him as usual, in the early spring of the year next after the feast described in the last chapter. Why he was called Farmer, I cannot say, unless it be that he was the owner of a cow, a pig or two, and some poultry, which he maintained on about an acre of land enclosed from the middle of a wild common, on which probably his father had squatted before Lords of Manners looked as keenly after their rights as they do now. Here he had lived no one knew how long, a solitary man. It was often rumoured that he was to be turned out and his cottage pulled down, but somehow it never came to pass, and his pigs and cow went grazing on the common, and his geese hissed at the passing children and at the heels of the horse of my Lord Steward, who often rode by with a cover to sigh on the enclosure still unmolested. His dwelling was some miles from our village, so Benjy, who was half ashamed of his errand, and wholly unable to walk there, had to exercise much ingenuity to get the means of transporting himself and Tom thither without exciting suspicion. However, one fine May morning he managed to borrow the old blind pony of our friend the publican, and Tom persuaded Madame Brown to give him a holiday to spend with old Benjy, and to lend them the squire's light cart, stored with bread and cold meat and a bottle of ale. And so the two in high glee started behind old Dobbin and jogged along the deep-rutted plashy roads, which had not been mended after their winter's wear, towards the dwelling of the wizard. About noon they passed the gate which opened onto the large common, and old Dobbin toiled slowly up the hill, while Benjy pointed out a little deep dingle on the left, out of which welled a tiny stream. As they crept up the hill, the tops of a few birch trees came in sight, and blue smoke curling up through their delicate light boughs, and then the little white thatched home, an enclosed ground of Farmer Ives, lying cradled in the dingle, with the gay gorse common rising behind and on both sides, while in front, after traversing a gentle slope, the eye might travel for miles and miles over the rich vale. They now left the main road, and struck into a green track over the common, marked lightly with wheel and horseshoe, which led down into the dingle, and stopped at the rough gate of Farmer Ives. Here they found the Farmer, an eye that iron gray old man, with a bushy eyebrow and strong aquiline nose, busied in one of his vocations. He was a horse and cow doctor, and was tending a sick beast which had been sent up to be cured. Benjy hailed him as an old friend, and he returned the greeting cordially enough, looking however hard for a moment, both at Benjy and Tom, to see whether there was more in their visit than appeared at first sight. It was a work of some difficulty and danger for Benjy to reach the ground, which, however, he managed to do without mishap. And then he devoted himself to unharnessing Dobbin and turning him out for a graze, a run one could not say of that virtuous steed on the common. This done he extricated the cold provisions from the cart, and they entered the Farmer's wicket, and he, shutting up the knife with which he was taking maggots out of the cow's back and sides, accompanied them towards the cottage. A big old lurcher got up slowly from the door-stone, stretching first one hind leg and then the other, and taking Tom's caresses and the presence of Toby, who kept, however, at a respectful distance, with equal indifference. Us we come to pay ye a visit. I've have been long-minded to do it for old sakes' sake. Only I vines I won't get about now as I used to it. I be so plaguey-bad with the rheumatism my back." Benjy paused, in hopes of drawing the Farmer at once on the subject of his ailments, without further direct application. Ah! I see as you've been quite so lissum as you was, replied the Farmer, with a grim smile, as he lifted the latch of his door. We've been so young as we was, another on us was luck. The Farmer's cottage was very like those of the better class of peasantry in general. A snug chimney-corner with two seats, and a small carpet on the hearth, an old flint gun, and a pair of spurs over the fireplace, a dresser with shelves on which some bright puter plates and crockery-ware were arranged, an old walnut table, a few chairs and settles, some framed samplers, and an old print or two, and a bookcase with some dozen volumes on the walls, a rack with flitches of bacon, and other stores fastened to the ceiling, and you have the best part of the furniture. No sign of occult art is to be seen, unless the bundles of dried herbs hanging to the rack and in the ingle and the row of labelled files on one of the shelves betoken it. Tom played about with some kittens who occupied the hearth, and with a goat who walked demurely in at the open door, while their host and Benjy spread the table for dinner, and was soon engaged in conflict with the cold meat, to which he did much honour. The two old men's talk was of old comrades and their deeds, mute inglorious militants of the Vale, and of the doings thirty years back, which didn't interest him much, except when they spoke of the making of the canal. And then indeed he began to listen with all his ears, and learned, to his no small wonder, that his dear and wonderful canal had not been there always, was not in fact so old as Benjy or Farmer Ives, which caused a strange commotion in his small brain. After dinner Benjy called attention to a wart which Tom had on the knuckles of his hand, and which the family doctor had been trying his skill on without success, and begged the farmer to charm it away. Farmer Ives looked at it, muttered something or another over it, and cut some notches in a short stick, which he handed to Benjy, giving him instructions for cutting it down on certain days, and cautioning Tom not to meddle with the wart for a fortnight. And then they strolled out and sat on a bench in the sun with their pipes, and the pigs came up and grunted sociably, and let Tom scratch them. And the farmer, seeing how he liked animals, stood up and held his arms in the air, and gave a call, which brought a flock of pigeons, wheeling and dashing through the birch trees. They settled down in clusters on the farmer's arms and shoulders, making love to him, and scrambling over one another's backs to get to his face. And then he threw them all off, and they fluttered about close by, and lighted on him again and again when he held up his arms. All the creatures about the place were clean and fearless, quite unlike their relations elsewhere, and Tom begged to be taught how to make all the pigs and cows and poultry in our village tame, at which the farmer only gave one of his grim chuckles. It wasn't until they were just ready to go, and old Dobbin was harnessed, that Benjy broached the subject of his rheumatism again, detailing his symptoms one by one. Poor old boy. He hoped the farmer could charm it away as easily as he could Tom's wart, and was ready with equal faith to put another notched sick into his other pocket for the cure of his own ailments. The physician shook his head, but nevertheless produced a bottle and handed it to Benjy, with instructions for use. Not as it'll do much good. Least ways I be afraid, not. Shading his eyes with his hand, and looking up at them in the cart. There's only one thing as I knows on, as will cure old folks like you and I of the rheumatism. What be that, then, farmer? inquired Benjy. Churchyard mould, said the old iron-grey man, with another chuckle. And so they said their goodbyes, and went their ways home. Tom's wart was gone in a fortnight, but not so Benjy's rheumatism, which laid him by the heels more and more. And though Tom still spent many an hour with him, as he sat on a bench in the sunshine, or by the chimney corner when it was cold, he soon had to seek elsewhere for his regular companions. Tom had been accustomed often to accompany his mother in her visits to the cottages, and had thereby made acquaintance with many of the village boys of his own age. There was Job Rudkin, son of Widow Rudkin, the most bustling woman in the parish. How she could ever have had such a stolid boy as Job for a child must always remain a mystery. The first time Tom went to their cottage with his mother, Job was not indoors, but he entered soon after, and stood with both hands in his pockets, staring at Tom. Widow Rudkin, who would have had to cross Madame to get at Young Hopeful, a breach of good manners of which she was wholly incapable, began a series of pantomime signs, which only puzzled him, and at last unable to contain herself longer burst out with, Job! Job! Where's thy cap? What? Be any on my head, mother? he replied Job, slowly extricating one hand from a pocket and feeling for the article in question, which he found on his head, sure enough, and left there to his mother's horror and Tom's great delight. Then there was poor Jacob Dodson, the half-witted boy, who ambled about cheerfully, undertaking messages and little helpful odds and ends for every one, which, however, poor Jacob always managed hopelessly to embrangle. Everything came to pieces in his hands, and nothing would stop in his head. They nicknamed him Jacob Doodle-Carf. But above all there was Harry Winburn, the quickest and best boy in the parish. He might be a year older than Tom, but was very little bigger, and he was the chryton of our village boys. He could wrestle and climb and run better than all the rest, and learned all that the schoolmaster could teach him faster than that worthy at all liked. He was a boy to be proud of, with his curly brown hair, keen gray eye, straight active figure, and little ears and hands and feet, as fine as a lords, as charity remarked to Tom one day, talking as usual great nonsense. Lords, hands and ears and feet are just as ugly as other folks when they are children, as anyone may convince himself if he likes to look. Tight boots and gloves, and doing nothing with them, I allow make a difference by the time they are twenty. Now that Benchy was laid on the shelf, and his young brothers were still under petticoat government, Tom, in search of companions, began to cultivate the village boys generally more and more. Squire Brown, be it said, was a true blue Tory to the backbone, and believed honestly that the powers which be were ordained of God, and that loyalty and steadfast obedience were men's first duties. Whether it were in consequence, or in spite of his political creed, I do not mean to give an opinion, though I have one, but certain it is that he held therewith diverse social principles not generally supposed to be true blue in colour. For most of these, and the one which the Squire loved to propound above all others, was the belief that a man is to be valued wholly and solely for that which is in himself, for that which stands up in the four fleshy walls of him, apart from clothes, rank, fortune, and all externals, whatsoever. Which belief I take to be a wholesome corrective of all political opinions, and if held sincerely, to make all opinions equally harmless, whether they be blue, red, or green? As a necessary corollary to this belief, Squire Brown held further that it didn't matter a straw whether his son associated with Lord's sons, or Plowman's sons, provided they were brave and honest. He himself had played football and gone bird-nesting with the farmers whom he met at vestry, and the labourers who tilled their fields, and so had his father and grandfather with their progenitors. So he encouraged Tom in his intimacy with the boys of the village, and forwarded it by all means in his power, and gave them the run of a close for a playground, and provided bats and balls and a football for their sports. Our village was blessed, amongst other things, with a well-endowed school. The building stood by itself, apart from the master's house, on an angle of ground where three roads met, an old gray stone building with a steep roof and mullion-dwindows. On one of the opposite angles stood Squire Brown's stables and kennel, with their backs to the road, over which towered a great elm tree. On the third stood the village carpenter and wheel-wright's large open shop, and his house and the school-masters, with long, low eaves, under which the swallows built by scores. The moment Tom's lessons were over, he would now get him down to this corner by the stables, and watch till the boys came out of school. He prevailed on the groom to cut notches for him in the bark of the elm, so that he could climb into the lower branches, and there he would sit, watching the school door, and speculating on the possibility of turning the elm into a dwelling-place for himself and friends, after the manner of the Swiss family Robinson. But the school hours were long, and Tom's patience short, so that he soon began to descend into the street, and go and peep in at the school door and the wheel-wright's shop, and look out for something to while away the time. Now the wheel-wright was a choleric man, and one fine afternoon, returning from a short absence, found Tom occupied with one of his pet adzes, the edge of which was fast vanishing under our hero's care. A speedy flight saved Tom from all but one sound cuff on the ears, but he resented this unjustifiable interruption of his first essays at Carpentring, and still more the further proceedings of the wheel-wright, who cut a switch and hung it over the door of his workshop, threatening to use it upon Tom if he came within twenty yards of his gate. So Tom, to retaliate, commenced a war upon the swallows who dwelt under the wheel-wright's eaves, whom he harassed with sticks and stones, and being fleeter afoot than his enemy, escaped all punishment, and kept him in perpetual anger. Moreover, his presence about the school door began to incense the master, as the boys in that neighbourhood neglected their lessons in consequence, and more than once he issued into the porch, rod in hand, just as Tom beat a hasty retreat. And he and the wheel-wright, laying their heads together, resolved to acquaint the squire with Tom's afternoon occupations. But in order to do it with effect, determined to take him captive and lead him away to judgment, fresh from his evil doings. This they would have found some difficulty in doing had Tom continued the war single-handed, or rather single-footed, for he would have taken to the deepest part of Pebbly Brook to escape them. But like other active powers, he was ruined by his alliances. Poor Jacob Doodlecalf could not go to the school with the other boys, and one fine afternoon, about three o'clock, the school broke up at four, Tom found him ambling about the street, and pressed him into a visit to the school porch. Jacob, always ready to do what he was asked, consented, and the two stole down to the school together. Tom first recognized the wheel-wright's shop, and seeing no signs of activity thought all safe in that quarter, and ordered at once an advance of all his troops upon the school porch. The door of the school was a jar, and the boys seated on the nearest bench at once recognized and opened a correspondence with the invaders. Tom, waxing bold, kept putting his head into the school, and making faces at the master when his back was turned. Poor Jacob, not in the least comprehending the situation, and in high glee at finding himself so near the school which he had never been allowed to enter, suddenly in a fit of enthusiasm, pushed by Tom and ambling three steps into the school, stood there, looking round him, and nodding with a self-approving smile. The master, who was stooping over a boy's slate with his back to the door, became aware of something unusual, and turned quickly round. Tom rushed at Jacob, and began dragging him back by his smock frock, and the master made at them scattering forms and boys in his career. Even now they might have escaped, but that in the porch, barring retreat appeared the crafty wheel-wright, who had been watching all their proceedings. So they were seized, the school dismissed, and Tom and Jacob led away to Squire Brown as lawful prize, the boys following to the gate in groups, and speculating on the result. The Squire was very angry at first, but the interview by Tom's pleading ended in a compromise. Tom was not to go near the school till three o'clock, and only then if he had done his own lessons well, in which case he was to be the bearer of a note to the master from Squire Brown, and the master agreed in such case to release ten or twelve of the best boys an hour before the time of breaking up, to go off and play in the close. The wheel-wright's adzes and swallows were to be forever respected, and that hero and the master withdrew to the servants' hall to drink the Squire's health well satisfied with their day's work. The second act of Tom's life may now be said to have begun. The War of Independence had been over for some time. None of the women now, not even his mother's maid, dared offer to help him in dressing or washing. Between ourselves he had often at first to run to Benji in an unfinished state of toilet. Charity and the rest of them seemed to take a delight in putting impossible buttons and ties in the middle of his back, but he would have gone without nether-integuments altogether sooner than have had recourse to female valeting. He had a room to himself, and his father gave him sixpence a weak pocket-money. All this he had achieved by Benji's advice and assistance. But now he had conquered another step in life, the step which all real boys so long to make. He had got amongst his equals in age and strength, and could measure himself with other boys. He lived with those whose pursuits and wishes and ways were the same in kind as his own. The little governess who had lately been installed in the house found her work grow wondrously easy, for Tom slaved at his lessons in order to make sure of his notes to the school-master. So there were very few days in the week in which Tom and the village boys were not playing in there close by three o'clock. Prisoner's base, rounders, High Cockalorum, cricket, football, he was soon initiated into the delights of them all, and though most of the boys were older than himself, he managed to hold his own very well. He was naturally active and strong, and quick of eye and hand, and had the advantage of light shoes and well-fitting dress, so that in a short time he could run and jump and climb with any of them. They generally finished their regular games half an hour or so before tea-time, and then began trials of skill and strength in many ways. Some of them would catch the Shetland pony who was turned out in the field, and get two or three together on his back, and the little rogue enjoying the fun would gallop off for fifty yards, and then turn round, or stop short and shoot them onto the turf, and then graze quietly on till he felt another load. Others played at peck-top or marbles, while a few of the bigger ones stood up for a bout at wrestling. Tom at first only looked on at this pastime, but it had peculiar attractions for him, and he could not long keep out of it. Elbow and collar wrestling, as practised in the western counties, was, next to back-sorting, the way to fame for the youth of the Vale, and all the boys knew the rules of it, and were more or less expert. But Joe Rudkin and Harry Winburn were the stars. The former stiff and sturdy, with legs like small towers, the latter pliant as India rubber and quicker lightning. Day after day they stood foot to foot, and offered first one hand and then the other, and grappled and closed, and swayed and strained, till a well-aimed crook of the heel or a thrust of the loin took effect, and a fair backfall ended the matter. And Tom watched with all his eyes, and first challenged one of the less scientific, and threw him, and so one by one wrestled his way up to the leaders. Then, indeed, for months he had a poor time of it. It was not long indeed before he could manage to keep his legs against Job, for that hero was slow of offence and gained his victories chiefly by allowing others to throw themselves against his immovable legs and loins. But Harry Winburn was undeniably his master. From the first clutch of hands when they stood up, down to the last trip which sent him on to his back on the turf, he felt that Harry knew more and could do more than he. Luckily Harry's bright unconsciousness and Tom's natural good temper kept them from quarrelling, and so Tom worked on and on, and trod more and more nearly on Harry's heels, and at last mastered all the dodges and falls except one. This one was Harry's own particular invention and pet. He scarcely ever used it except when hard pressed, but then out it came and as sure as it did overwent poor Tom. He thought about that fall at his meals, in his walks, when he lay awake in bed, in his dreams, but all to no purpose, until Harry one day in his open way suggested to him how he thought it should be met, and in a week from that time the boys were equal. Save only the slight difference of strength in Harry's favour which some extra ten months of age gave. Tom had often afterwards reason to be thankful for that early drilling, and above all for having mastered Harry Winburn's fall. Besides their home games, on Saturdays the boys would wander all over the neighbourhood, sometimes to the downs or up to the camp where they cut their initials out in the springy turf, and watched the hawks soaring and the peat-bird, as Harry Winburn called the grey plover, gorgeous in his wedding-feathers, and so home, racing down the manger with many a role among the thistles, or through Affington Wood to watch the fox-cubs playing in the green rides, sometimes to Rosie Brook to cut long whispering reeds which grew there to make pan-pipes of, sometimes to more mills where was a piece of old forest land with short, browsed turf and tufted brownbly thickets stretching under the oaks, amongst which rumour declared that a raven, last of his race, still lingered, or to the sand-hills in vain quest of rabbits, and bird-nesting in the season, anywhere and everywhere. The few neighbours of the Squire's own rank every now and then would shrug their shoulders as they drove or rode by a party of boys with Tom in the middle, carrying along bull-rushes or whispering reeds, or great bundles of cow-slip and meadow-sweet, or young starlings or magpies, or other spoil of wood, brook, or meadow. And lawyer Red Tape might mutter to Squire straight back at the board that no good would come of the young Browns if they were let run wild with all the dirty village boys, whom the best farmer's sons even would not play with. And the Squire might reply with a shake of his head that his sons only mixed with their equals and never went into the village without the governess or a footman. But luckily Squire Brown was full of stiff back to his neighbours, and so went on his own way, and Tom and his younger brothers, as they grew up, went on playing with the village boys without the idea of equality or inequality, except in wrestling, running, and climbing, ever entering their heads, as it doesn't till it's put there by jack nasties or fine ladies-maids. I don't mean to say that it would be the case in all villages, but it certainly was so in this one. The village boys were full as manly and honest, and certainly purer than those in a higher rank, and Tom got more harm from his equals in his first fortnight at a private school, where he went when he was nine years old, than he had had from his village friends from the day he left charities apron strings. Great was the grief amongst the village schoolboys when Tom drove off with the Squire one August morning to meet the coach on his way to school. Each of them had given him some little present of the best that he had, and his small private box was full of peg-taps, white marbles, called alitores in the veil, screws, bird's eggs, whip-cord, juice-harps, and other miscellaneous boys' wealth. Poor Jacob Doodlecarth, in floods of tears, had pressed upon him with spluttering earnestness his lame pet hedgehog. He had always some poor broken-down beast or bird by him. But this Tom had been obliged to refuse by the Squire's order. He had given them all a great tea under the big elm in their playground, for which Madame Brown had supplied the biggest cake ever seen in our village, and Tom was really as sorry to leave them as they to lose him, but his sorrow was not unmixed with the pride and excitement of making a new step in life. And this feeling carried him through his first parting with his mother better than could have been expected. Their love was as fair and whole as human love can be. Perfect self-sacrifice on the one side, meeting a young and true heart on the other. It is not within the scope of my book, however, to speak of family relations, or I should have much to say on the subject of English mothers. I, and of English fathers, and sisters, and brothers too. Neither have I room to speak of our private schools. What I have to say is about public schools, those much abused and much be lauded institutions peculiar to England. So we must hurry through Master Tom's year at a private school as fast as we can. It was a fair average specimen, kept by a gentleman, with another gentleman as second master. But it was little enough of the real work they did, merely coming into school when lessons were prepared and all ready to be heard. The whole discipline of the school out of lesson hours was in the hands of the two ushers, one of whom was always with the boys in their playground, in the school, at meals, in fact at all times and everywhere till they were fairly in bed at night. Now the theory of private schools is, or was, constant supervision out of school, therein differing fundamentally from that of public schools. It may be right or wrong, but if right, this supervision surely ought to be the special work of the headmaster, the responsible person. The object of all schools is not to ram Latin and Greek into boys, but to make them good English boys, good future citizens, and by far the most important part of that work must be done or not done out of school hours. To leave it, therefore, in the hands of inferior men, is just giving up the highest and hardest part of the work of education. Where I a private schoolmaster, I should say, let who will hear the boys their lessons, but let me live with them when they are at play and rest. The two ushers at Tom's first school were not gentlemen, and very poorly educated, and were only driving their poor trade of usher to get such living as they could out of it. They were not bad men, but had little heart for their work, and of course were bent on making it as easy as possible. One of the methods by which they endeavored to accomplish this was by encouraging tail-bearing, which had become a frightfully common vice in the school in consequence, and had sapped all the foundations of school morality. Another was, by favouring grossly the biggest boys, who alone could have given them much trouble, whereby those young gentlemen became most abominable tyrants, oppressing the little boys in all the small, mean ways which prevail in private schools. Poor little Tom was made dreadfully unhappy in his first week by a catastrophe which happened to his first letter home. With huge labour he had, on the very evening of his arrival, managed to fill two sides of a sheet of letter paper with assurances of his love for his dear mama, his happiness at school, and his resolve to do all she would wish. This missive, with the help of the boy who sat at the desk next to him, also a new arrival, he managed to fold successfully, but this done they were sadly put to it for means of sealing. Envelopes were not then known, they had no wax, and dared not disturb the stillness of the evening school-room by getting up and going to ask the usher for some. At length Tom's friend, being of an ingenious turn of mind, suggested sealing with ink, and the letter was accordingly stuck down with a blob of ink, and duly handed by Tom on his way to bed to the housekeeper to be posted. It was not till four days afterwards that the good dame sent for him, and produced the precious letter and some wax saying, Oh, Master Brown, I forgot to tell you before, but your letter isn't sealed. Poor Tom took the wax in silence and sealed his letter, with a huge lump rising in his throat during the process, and then ran away to a quiet corner of the playground and burst into an agony of tears. The idea of his mother waiting day after day for the letter he had promised her at once, and perhaps thinking him forgetful of her, when he had done all in his power to make good his promise, was as bitter a grief as any which he had to undergo for many a long year. His wrath, then, was proportionately violent when he was aware of two boys who stopped close by him, and one of whom, a fat gay bee of a fellow, pointed at him and called him Young Mammy Sick, whereupon Tom rose, and giving vent thus to his grief and shame and rage, smote his derider on the nose, and made it bleed, which sent that young worthy howling to the usher, who reported Tom for violent and unprovoked assault and battery. Hitting in the face was a felony punishable with flogging, other hitting only a misdemeanor, a distinction not altogether clear in principle. Tom, however, escaped the penalty by pleading premium tempus, and having written a second letter to his mother in closing some forget-me-nots which he picked on their first half-holiday walk, felt quite happy again, and began to enjoy vastly a good deal of his new life. These half-holiday walks were the great events of the week. The whole fifty boys started after dinner with one of the ushers for Hazeldown, which was distant some mile or so from the school. Hazeldown measured some three miles round, and in the neighbourhood were several woods full of all manner of birds and butterflies. The usher walked slowly round the down with such boys as liked to accompany him. The rest scattered in all directions, being only bound to appear again when the usher had completed his round and accompanied him home. They were forbidden, however, to go anywhere except on the down and into the woods. The village had been especially prohibited, where huge bullseyes and unctuous toffee might be procured in exchange for coin of the realm. Various were the amusements to which the boys then betook themselves. At the entrance of the down there was a steep hillock, like the barrows of Tom's own downs. This mound was the weekly scene of terrific combats, at a game called by the queer name of Mudpatties. The boys who played divided into sides under different leaders, and one side occupied the mound. Then all parties having provided themselves with many sods of turf, cut with their bread-and-cheese knives, the side which remained at the bottom proceeded to assault the mound, advancing up on all sides under cover of a heavy fire of turfs, and then struggling for victory with the occupants, which was theirs as soon as they could even for a moment clear the summit, when they in turn became the besieged. It was a good rough dirty game and of great use in counteracting the sneaking tendencies of the school. Then others of the boys spread over the downs, looking for the holes of bumblebees and mice, which they dug up without mercy. Often I regret to say killing and skinning the unlucky mice, and, I do not regret to say, getting well stung by the bumblebees. Others went after butterflies and bird's eggs in their seasons, and Tom found on Hazeldown, for the first time, the beautiful little blue butterfly with golden spots on his wings, which he had never seen on his own downs, and dug out his first sand-martins' nest. This latter achievement resulted in a flogging, for the sand-martins built in a high bank close to the village, consequently out of bounds. But one of the bolder spirits of the school, who never could be happy unless he was doing something to which risk was attached, easily persuaded Tom to break bounds and visit the martins' bank. From whence it being only a step to the toffee-shop, what could be more simple than to go on there and fill their pockets? Or what more certain than that, on their return, a distribution of treasure having been made, the usher should shortly detect the forbidden smell of bullseyes, and a search ensuing discover the state of the britch's pockets of Tom and his ally. This ally of Tom's was indeed a desperate hero in the sight of the boys, and feared as one who dealt in magic or something approaching there too. Which reputation came to him in this wise? The boys went to bed at eight, and of course consequently lay awake in the dark for an hour or two, telling ghost stories by turns. One night, when it came to his turn, and he had dried up their souls by his story, he suddenly declared that he would make a fiery hand appear on the door, and to the astonishment and terror of the boys in his room, a hand, or something like it, in pale light, did then and there appear. The fame of this exploit having spread to the other rooms, and being discredited there, the young necromancer declared that the same wonder would appear in all rooms in turn, which it accordingly did. And the whole circumstances having been privately reported to one of the ushers, as usual, that functionary, after listening at the doors of the rooms by a sudden dissent caught the performer in his night-shirt, with a box of phosphorus in his guilty hand. Lucifer matches, and all the present facilities for getting acquainted with fire, were then unknown. The very name of phosphorus had something diabolic in it to the boy-mind, so Tom's ally, at the cost of a sound flogging, earned what many older folk covered much, the very decided fear of most of his companions. He was a remarkable boy, and by no means a bad one. Tom stuck to him till he left, and got into many scrapes by so doing. But he was the great opponent of the tail-bearing habits of the school, and the open enemy of the ushers, and so worthy of all support. Tom imbibed a fair amount of Latin and Greek at the school, but somehow on the whole it didn't suit him, or he it, and in the holidays he was constantly working the squire to send him at once to a public school. Great was his joy, then, when in the middle of his third half-year, in October 1830-something, a fever broke out in the village, and the master having himself slightly sickened of it, the whole of the boys were sent off at a day's notice to their respective homes. The squire was not quite so pleased as master Tom to see that young gentleman's brown, merry face appear at home, some two months before the proper time, for the Christmas holidays. And so, after putting on his thinking-cap, he retired to his study and wrote several letters, the result of which was that, one morning at the breakfast-table, about a fortnight after Tom's return, he addressed his wife with, my dear, I have arranged that Tom shall go to Rugby at once, for the last six weeks of this half-year, instead of wasting them in riding and loitering about home. It is very kind of the doctor to allow it. Will you see that his things are all ready by Friday, when I shall take him up to town, and send him down the next day by himself? Mrs. Brown was prepared for the announcement, and merely suggested a doubt whether Tom were yet old enough to travel by himself. However, finding both father and son against her on this point, she gave in, like a wise woman, and proceeded to prepare Tom's kit for his launch into a public school.