Such a clever man! Such a good teacher! the Lawford people said. There was nothing against him but a drop of drink, and this drop of drink had kept Humphrey Bone a poor man, dislocated his hip in a fall upon a dark night, when the former doctor of the place had not discovered the exact nature of the injury till it was too late, and the drop of drink in this instance had resulted in the partaker becoming a permanent cripple. Lawford was such a slow-moving place in those days, that it took its principal inhabitants close upon twenty years to decide that a master who very often went home helplessly intoxicated, and who had become a hopeless moral wreck, living in a state of squalor and debt, could not be a fitting person to train and set an example to the boys left in his charge. And at last, but in the face of great opposition from the old-fashioned party arrayed against the Rev Eli Mallow and his friends--the party who reiterated the cry that Humphrey Bone was such a clever man, wrote such a copperplate-like hand, when his fingers were not palsied, and measured land so well--it was decided that Humphrey Bone should be called upon to resign at Christmas, and Luke Ross, the son of the Lawford tanner, then training at Saint Chrysostom's College, London, should take his place. It was only natural that Sage Portlock, as she advanced to meet Humphrey Bone, should think of the coming days after the holidays, when Mr Ross, whom she had known so well from childhood, should be master of the adjoining school, and that very unpleasant personage now present should cease to trouble her with visits that were becoming more and more distasteful and annoying. "Mornin'! Ink!" said Mr Bone, shortly. "Ours like mud. How are you?" "Ink, Mr Bone?" said the young mistress, ignoring the husky inquiry after her health. "Yes; one of the girls shall bring some in." This and the young mistress's manner should have made Mr Humphrey Bone retire, but he stood still in the middle of the room, chuckling softly; and then, to the open-eyed delight of the whole school, drew a goose-quill from his breast, stripped off the plume from one side of the shaft, and, with a very keen knife, proceeded to cut, nick, and shape one of the pens for which he bore a great reputation, holding it out afterwards for the young mistress to see. "That beats training, eh? Didn't teach you to make a pen like that at Westminster, did they, eh?" "No," said Sage, quietly; "we always used steel pens." "Hah--yes?" ejaculated the old schoolmaster, with a laugh of derision. "Steel pens--steel teaching--steel brains--they'll have steel machine teachers soon, who can draw a goose like that on a black board with a bit of chalk. Faugh!" He pointed to one of a series of woodcuts mounted on millboard and hung against the whitewashed wall, stumped away three or four yards, and then returned. "New ways--new theories--new machines! Wear the old ones out and chuck 'em away--eh?"