It was Wednesday, a half-holiday at the village school of High Tor, and the work of learning and the yet harder toil of teaching were for that day over. Ethel Gray had seen the last of her released pupils scamper joyously off homewards, and was busied in putting away books and maps, when the clatter of heavy shoes caused her to turn her eyes towards the doorway, wherein stood a tall slip of a girl, looking absurdly big and bony for the clothes which she had outgrown. Ethel knew the freckled face, and smiled pleasantly in answer to its owner’s grin of recognition. ‘If you please, miss,’ said the new-comer, sidling towards the school-mistress‒‘if you please, mother sent I down from the moor to say how ’twas my little brother didn’t ’tend here nouther Monday, nor yetterer Tuesday, nor now. Little Lenny be down in the fever; that’s why he ben’t here, please.’ ‘What fever?’ asked Ethel. She had not been long enough at High Tor to become thoroughly familiar with the diction of the country folks. ‘_The_ fever, to be sure!’ reiterated the tall girl, who might have been some fourteen years of age, amazed that so learned a personage as she took Miss Gray to be should boggle over so patent a physiological fact. ‘It do be going about most at fall-time; but Lenny’s only a wishy one, ye know, so he’s took with the shiver fits in June, getting wet at the hayfield; and so, mother bein’ main fond o’ he, as we ’m all, when he begs her to “let Miss Gray, to school, know ’twarn’t his fault,” why mother says: “Betty, get thee down to village and do the child’s arrand.” That be all.’ The quick tears rose glistening to Ethel’s eyes. There was something pathetic in the idea of this tiny sufferer tossing on his bed of pain beneath the rotting thatch of the cottage among the moorlands, and anxious to excuse his involuntary default to the kind teacher whom he had already learned to love. He was a pet pupil of Ethel’s, this wee boy Lenny, or Leonard Mudge by name, as being one of those rare learners who seem to thirst after the fountains of knowledge towards which others have to be cajoled or driven. Day after day had the new school-mistress seen Lenny in class, the readiest to come, the least eager to leave, his bright large eyes intent upon the face of his instructress.