If Walter Bramber was afflicted with superior education, it was probably no more his fault than is water on the brain in a rickety child. And if he was a schoolmaster by profession, perhaps it was not his fault, but his misfortune. He’d been bred to it by his unfeeling and unnatural parents, just as in London some boys were brought up to be thieves and pickpockets. Mr. Puddicombe, indeed, had taken up schoolmastering, but that was a different matter; he had not been reared to anything of the sort, and had adopted it rather as a pastime than a profession, and had never allowed it to interfere with his robust and intelligent pleasures, such as cock-fighting; and Mr. Puddicombe drank and smoked and swore sometimes, and all that showed he was a man. On the whole, Coombe-in-Teignhead agreed to accept Walter Bramber and Kitty as his wife, with the proviso that it would kick them over should they attempt to give themselves airs. As for the rector, he was radiant with happiness. Now at last he saw some prospect of making an impression for good on his parishioners, if not of elevating the existing generation, of greatly raising the moral and intellectual tone of that which would follow. He had striven hard for years in isolation and with absolutely no success. Now, with the aid of a peculiarly well-qualified schoolmaster, and with Kitty at that master’s side to direct the girls as Bramber guided the minds of the boys, he was sanguine of success, not of much that he would see himself, but of a success in the far future. Of no profession can that be said more truly than of that of the pastor, “One soweth’another reapeth.”