And he called it a tale of sin. I, Johnny Ludlow, think it is more like a tale of suffering. X. A DAY OF PLEASURE. We all liked Captain Sanker; a post-captain in the navy, ages since on half-pay; who came into Worcestershire, and brought a letter of introduction to the Squire. He was about a seventeenth cousin of the Sankers of Wales, and a twenty-seventh of Mrs. Todhetley. The captain and his wife and family, six children, had lived in Ireland and the Channel Islands, and other cheap localities, making both ends of their income meet as well as they could--and nobody need be told how poor is the half-pay of naval officers, and what a fight and a struggle it is to rub along. At last, through the death of a relative of Mrs. Sanker, they dropped into quite a fortune, and came over to settle at Worcester. A Dr. Teal, who had also recently come to Worcester, and was an old friend of Captain Sanker, proposed it to them. He wrote a flaming account of the pretty place that Worcester was, of the loveliness of the surrounding country; and of the great advantage the college school would be to the young Sankers, in giving them a free education if they could be got into it. The prospect of a free education for his boys took with the captain, and he lost no time in removing to Worcester, the Welsh Sankers giving him an introduction to us. We grew pretty intimate: calling on them when we went to Worcester for a day, and having them over to spend days with us. All the young Sankers were got into the college school by degrees, and became four of the forty king's scholars. At that time--it is long past now--the school was not thought much of, for the boys were taught little but the classics, so entrance was easy: Latin, Greek, bad writing, and the first rule in arithmetic: there it ended. Captain Sanker thought the education first-rate, and had them all enrolled: Frederick, Daniel, King, and Toby. As to Toby, I fancy his real name was Alfred, but I never heard him called by it. They had been in Worcester between one and two years, when Tod and I went over to them on a visit. The captain had come to spend a summer's day at Crabb Cot, and in his jolly, open-hearted fashion insisted on taking us two back with him. He was a short, stout man, with grey hair, and merry bright blue eyes all alight with smiles. The college school would be breaking up for its long holidays in a week or so, and it would have been better for us to have gone then; but the captain always did things on impulse, and had no more forethought than young Toby. The holidays were taken late that year, and would be very long, because the college hall, which was the schoolroom, would be wanted for the music-meeting in September.