We had to teach in the Sunday-school. My services were early utilised in that direction, for the village was badly supplied with the stuff of which teachers were made, and as the parson’s son I was supposed to have an ex-officio qualification for the task. I fear I was but a poor hand in the work of teaching the young idea how to shoot, especially when that idea was developed in the bodies of great hulking fellows, my seniors in years and superiors in size. However, one of them did turn out well. Many years after he recognised me in the Gray’s Inn Road, London, where he had made money as a builder, and where, though he never learned to read—perhaps that was my fault—he figured for a time largely on the walls as the Protestant churchwarden. “You know, sir,” he said to me, “how poor we all were at W—” (the father, I fear, was a drunkard), “Well, I came to London, resolving to be either a man or a mouse”; and here he was, as respectable-looking a man as any you could see, thus proving what I hold to be the truth, that in this land of ours, however deep in the mire a man may be, he may rise, if he has the requisite power of work and endurance and self-denial. I fear he did not much profit by our Sunday-school, though he told me he had put it down in his will for a small legacy. Our chief man was a shoemaker named Roberts, who sat with the boys under the pulpit in face of all the people; the girls, with the modesty of the sex, retiring to the back seats of the gallery. In his hand he bore a long wand, and woe to the unfortunate lad who fell asleep while the sermon was going on, or endeavoured to relieve the tedium of it by eating apples, sucking sweets, or revealing to his fellows the miscellaneous treasures of his pocket in the shape of marbles or string or knife. On such an offender down came the avenging stroke, swift as lightning and almost as sharp. As to general education, there was no attempt to give it. Later on, the Dissenters raised enough money to build a day-school, and then the Churchmen were stirred up to do the same. There was a school, kept by an irritable, red-faced old party in knee-breeches, who had failed in business, where I and most of the farmers’ sons of the village went; but I can’t say that any of us made much progress, and I did better when I was taken back to the home and educated, my father hearing my Latin and Greek as he smoked his pipe, while my mother—a very superior woman, with a great taste for literature and art—acted as teacher, while she was at work painting, after the duties of housekeeping were over. I ought to have been a better boy. But there were two great drawbacks—one, the absence of all emulation, which too often means the loss of all worldly success; the other, the painful and useless effort to be good. CHAPTER IV. VILLAGE SPORTS AND PASTIMES.