The parents had been proud of the little fellow’s cleverness, and with an unselfishness not universal in the poor and struggling class to which they belonged, had contrived not merely to save the school-pence that supplemented the government grant, but to send the boy down under such escort as could be found for him, day after day. Now it was a carter, who would perch Lenny on the shaft of his rough chariot; now a stalwart lass, bent on earning her ninepence for a day’s hard work at the washing-tub, and who allowed the little scholar to trot by her side; sometimes a mushroom-gatherer or gleaner of whortleberries from the waste, and who was not unwilling to take temporary charge of Lenny. Sometimes, as a great concession, Sister Betty would be spared from weeding or cow-tending, to convoy Leonard, too young to go alone, to High Tor. As for Betty herself, she had been relegated, long ago in the bygone days of her own short schooling, into the category of unteachables. She was a good girl; but two successive mistresses had given her up as a hopeless dunce, long before Betty began to earn two-thirds of her own living, and Ethel Gray to be mistress of High Tor school. ‘I’ll go and see Lenny. It is a half-holiday for me, you know, as well as for the children. How far is it, Betty? But I’m sure it is not too far, for I am a tolerable walker, if you will shew me the way,’ said Ethel impulsively. Now this, as Betty knew, was the very consummation which her mother, whose perceptions had been for the time sharpened by the stimulus of maternal love, desired to bring about. The moorland lass was not much of a diplomatist, but she was quite well aware that to exaggerate the difficulties of an enterprise is often to damp the spirits of those who undertake it. ‘It’s not fur,’ said Betty argumentatively; ‘that’s to say,’ she added, as her conscience smote her, ‘not to call fur, but a goodish walk. But ’tis mortal fine to-day. And Lenny he’d be so glad!’ Ethel hesitated no longer, but merely mentioning her errand to the decent old village dame who was her housekeeper and factotum, threw her rain-cloak over her arm‒no bad precaution in that moist climate‒and under Betty’s guidance set forth. As to the beauty of the day, Betty was speaking within bounds when she described it as ‘mortal fine.’ The sparkling sky was as blue as a sapphire, and the breeze balmy enough to have blown over the orange groves and geranium hedges of Bermuda. It was, in short, one of those so-called ‘gaudy’ mornings which rarely, in the uncertain climate of our latitudes, finish as they have begun; least of all among the wilds of savage Dartmoor, the very cradle and nesting-place of bad weather.