worst of us and the best of us, went like homing pigeons to my mother, and she gave the same welcome to the one and to the other, and for ever treasured both. The relationship of each one of us to her was unique as regards any other of us, for each of us found exactly and precisely what we desired, though how often we did not know what we desired till she gave it us! All her life she was wiser and younger than anybody else, limpid and bubbling, and from the first days when any of us began to understand what she was, she never had any blank surprises in store, for it was always quite obvious that she would understand and appreciate, and would never condone but always forgive. Never from first to last did I repent having opened my heart to her; never did I not repent having shut it. I do not think she ever asked any of us for a confidence, but the knowledge, conveyed in the very atmosphere of her, that she was ready, toeing the mark, so to speak, to run to us when the pistol fired, gave her that particular precision of sympathy. Did she scold us? Why, of course; but how her precious balms healed our heads! Love is a stern business, and about hers there was never the faintest trace of sentimentality. She loved with a swift eagerness, and she had no warm slops to comfort us. But there was always the compliment of consultation. “Now you’ve behaved very badly indeed,” she would say, “Don’t you think the first thing to do is to say you’re sorry?”... And then with that inimitable breaking of her smile, “Oh, my dear, I _am_ glad you told me.”... And did ever any other mother at the age of forty run so violently in playing that strenuous game called, “Three knights a-riding,” that she broke a sinew in her leg? Mine did. And did ever a mother so encourage an extremely naughty boy of thirteen after a really dreadful interview with his father, as by giving him a prayer book and saying, “I shall write in it ‘Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his ways?’” Being called a young man at the age of thirteen was enough in itself to make him realize what an exceedingly tiresome child he had been. Tact! Beth used to call it “tac,” and when I got my shoes wet through three times a day, or fell backwards into one of those Cornish streams she said, “Eh, Master Fred, but you’ve got no tac’!” No more I had. CHAPTER VI THE DUNCE’S PROGRESS